


A Few Small Repairs

by TourmalineGreen



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: 'cause i got issues, Alcohol, Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Blood and Injury, DIY as seduction, Drunk Driving, Evil Property Developers, F/M, Mild Blood, Past Character Death, Pining, The struggle against gentrification, Yoga, and hipsters, and you got 'em too, antique stores, ben might be a lapsed alcoholic, but both of them need one, cancer reference, pot, rey has unresolved anger issues, rey is not a therapist, throwing things as therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-24
Updated: 2019-03-18
Packaged: 2019-04-27 08:55:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 69,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14421900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TourmalineGreen/pseuds/TourmalineGreen
Summary: “I don’t want to sell,” Rey said. “That doesn’t seem like a complicated concept for you to grasp, and the fact that you can’t get started ruining another block isn’t really my problem.”“Ruining?” The furrow in his brow deepened; so did his voice.“I saw what you did across the street. That ridiculous monolith? You’ll forgive me if I’m not exactly enthused at seeing another block wiped out to match it.”He blinked at her. Anger was evident on his face, blossoming up swiftly, then contained again, neutral. But Rey could already see that he had a tell: the way his full lips pursed slightly, then relaxed, like he was chewing on his own hasty reply and swallowing it back down in favor of something more thoughtful. That, and the faint tic under his eye.-OR: Ben Solo is a ruthless property developer, and Rey Johnson is the lone holdout on the block. She does not intend to give up what's hers, not for anything. (Not even for a pair of pretty eyes.)





	1. Chapter 1

In hindsight, it wasn’t exactly a surprise that the sleek black car which pulled up in front of her shop on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday afternoon would’ve been her undoing. Rey looked up from her workbench, standing slightly as she looked out the dusty windows of her loft, peering down at the car. It was expensive; she could tell that from here, even if she didn’t know what kind of car it was at first glance. It just had the look, though: shiny chrome detailing, an impeccable black paint job, and a faint glint of red from the sleek wheels… there was no doubt about it.

This car belonged to an asshole.

Rey frowned and set down her tools, watching as the driver’s-side door opened. A tall man in a black suit got out. She could only get a glimpse of his features and his longish dark hair before he made his way around the front of his car, buttoning his jacket.

An instant later, she heard the bell on the downstairs door ring. She’d wired it to ring up in her loft as well, but after the last rainstorm, the upstairs bell had turned into a buzzer, and she hadn’t had time to go into the wiring and fix it. Rey hastily wiped her hands down the front of her tunic and headed to the stairs.

She was halfway down the rickety steps before she nervously called out: “Hi, sorry, I was just upstairs working. What can I do for you?”

By the time she’d finished speaking, Rey was on the downstairs landing, looking out across the mismash of shelves and cases, picking out the tall, dark-haired visitor easily. His black suit and commanding presence stood out even more against the contents of her shop. Everything else looked like junk next to his composed posture and pristine suit. He stood there, his back to her for a moment longer than was strictly necessary, or polite, before turning around to look at her. There was something coldly calculating in his almost aristocratic profile, and Rey didn’t know what to make of it; he wasn’t her typical customer, that was for sure. Quickly, although not too quickly, he rearranged his features into something resembling a smile.

“Rey Johnson?”

“Yes?” Rey smiled back at him, tucking a strand of hair that had fallen out of her messy bun back behind her ear. “Can I help you?”

“Just glad to put a face with a name,” the man said, his low baritone rolling over her as he stepped forward and offered her his hand. “Ben Solo, First Order Property Development.”

Rey felt her smile fall as she reluctantly took his proffered hand, shaking it once and then letting it drop. She wiped her hand on her tunic, conscious more of the leftover grease and mess on her hand, before realizing, a little too late, that he’d seen her do it. His smile faltered as well, then recovered, his face schooled into a neutral expression.

“Pleasure,” she said flatly. “I received your last letter, and my answer is the same. I’m not interested in selling.”

Rey turned and slid back behind the counter, finding an excuse to check the receipt tape and avoid meeting his gaze. She could almost feel his displeasure, but it only fed the ire that was already building inside of her; the absolute _gall_ of him, showing up here to bully her...

“So… that’s it, then?” he said flatly. “You’re saying no.”

“That’s right.” Rey glanced up at him, sensing the weight of his gaze on her skin. “I like my shop, and I’m declining your offer. Which I believe I said in my reply.”

“You did,” he said. The man took a step towards her, and then a second step, until he stood on the other side of the counter. Stood… more like loomed, because he was just too bloody tall.

Rey finally looked up at him, and held his gaze. His eyes were a curious hazel, deep brown around the pupil and and almost green-gold around the edge; they were fringed with dark lashes, the kind of lovely dark lashes that men always had never appreciated. Rey felt her anger growing.  

“So… why are you here, then?”

The corner of his mouth quirked up. “Because I—forgive me for being presumptuous, Miss Johnson, but I’m confused. We often have people refuse our offers, and they do it because they want to negotiate with us, get a higher payout. But you… you’ve refused three very good offers, and haven’t sent back a single counter-offer.”

“What’s there to understand?” Rey suppressed the urge to snap back. “I want to keep my building, my business.”

“Miss Johnson, we’ve already purchased all of the other buildings on this block. Surely that can’t have gone without notice,” he said. “And yet, we’ve had one lone holdout. Just you.”

The man took a breath, and Rey realized that he was terrible at hiding his frustration with her; her resistance was riling him up, and oddly, this made her feel calmer. Like she had the upper hand, even if it was only for this moment. She smiled.

“Huh.” Rey closed the cover to the register’s receipt printer with a satisfying click. “Just me.”

Mr. Solo furrowed his brow. “Yes. Construction has been delayed already because of you. We have crews waiting to start demolition, but the city won’t let us begin on the other buildings until we have the deed to your property. Safety hazards of setting up near an occupied residence, and all that.”

“I don’t want to sell,” Rey said. “That doesn’t seem like a complicated concept for you to grasp, and the fact that you can’t get started ruining another block isn’t really my problem.”

“Ruining?” The furrow in his brow deepened; so did his voice.

“I saw what you did across the street. That ridiculous monolith? You’ll forgive me if I’m not exactly enthused at seeing another block wiped out to match it.”

He blinked at her. Anger was evident on his face, blossoming up swiftly, then contained again, neutral. But Rey could already see that he had a tell: the way his full lips pursed slightly, then relaxed, like he was chewing on his own hasty reply and swallowing it back down in favor of something more thoughtful. That, and the faint tic under his eye.

She could tell, though; she could always tell. Trusting in her snap judgments of other people’s emotions and intentions had been one of the key methods of her survival, and she wasn’t about to ignore it now. Even if his mouth hadn’t been so expressive… it was a plush, almost feminine contrast to the rest of his face’s intriguing angles. It was really unfair that a shark like him had to be so attractive—Rey halted that train of thought as quickly as she could, looking back down the glass-topped counter and pulling out the jewelry display drawer just to give herself some kind of distraction. These were some of her own creations, necklaces mostly, mingled in with vintage pieces. She set the drawer down on top of the counter, ensuring that his hands couldn’t rest on the edge. With faintly-shaking hands, Rey straightened the display, feeling Mr. Solo’s dark gaze on her as she worked.  

“Seven hundred and fifty thousand,” he said, after a few silent, heated moments had passed between them.

Rey didn’t even look up at him. She swallowed; it was two hundred _thousand_ dollars more than his most recent offer. She’d declined that one, too.

“No.”

At this, he let out a soft noise, the faintest of annoyed growls, and Rey felt a thrill of fear go through her; he was nearly a head taller than her, broad in the shoulders, a deceptively solid body under that slim-cut, expensive-looking black suit; there was something feral and barely contained about him, and Rey knew that her rejection would only serve to infuriate him further.

Good.

“Alright,” he said, and his raw baritone had shifted back to something approximating a genteel, mild voice, which Rey knew for a fact was an illusion. “How much for the green one?”

“What?” Rey looked up at him.

“The green one, the necklace,” he said, pointing down at the tray that she’d pulled out onto the counter top. Rey looked at the one he was indicating, and, trying not to notice how big his hands were, how long his fingers—

“It’s two hundred dollars,” Rey replied. She knew precisely which one he was asking for, because it was her favorite piece: An unusual vintage necklace, one she’d refashioned and cleaned carefully to reveal the art deco details, embellished with some of her own wirework. She’d put hours into it, and always wondered who it would go home with.

He made a noise of agreement, and pulled his wallet out of the inner breast pocket of his jacket. Rey watched, startled, as he pulled out the stack of bills, counting out two hundred-dollar notes from what had to be several thousand dollars worth of fresh-from-the-bank cash and holding them out to her. She hesitated, but only for a moment, and then took the money. Her hand brushed against his, a brief spark of something passed between them. Rey punched in the amount and put the cash carefully in the register drawer when it sprung open.

 _Are you planning on wearing it out?_ Rey resisted the urge to ask.

Instead she went with: “Would you like it wrapped?”

“Yes, please,” came his low reply.

Rey shivered out of pure simmering rage. This clearly was just some excuse to stick around and get a read on her, and she wasn’t having it. She pulled out the brown kraft jewelry box, though, and nestled the necklace atop the soft square of padding. One last brush of her fingertip across the stone, and then the lid went on. She bound it in twine, and tied it in a neat knot; no bows for him, even if she’d been in a good mood.

She slid the box carefully into the brown bag which had been stamped with her business logo and the address of her online store.

“Here you are,” Rey said, and set the bag on the counter. He’d been watching her the whole time, a curious, almost amused expression on his face; he was laughing at her, she could just tell. He found this funny. Rey felt ashamed, withering under his scrutiny. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of bending, though.

He smiled at her. “Nice chatting with you, Miss Johnson. Have a good afternoon.”

Rey bit down on the inside of her cheek to keep from replying. He turned on the heel of his expensive, shiny shoes, and headed for the door. She hummed an indistinct noise and gave him a little wave, watching from under her lashes as he left, hoping he could feel the daggers she was staring into his back.

Fuck him.

Honestly, _fuck_ him! Who did he think he was, Mr. Tall, Dark and Entitled, coming to her work like this, not taking no for an answer? Hadn’t she sent back her replies, all three times his miserable, gentrifying nightmare of a company had tried to buy her off?

Rey slid the display back into the counter top, restraining herself from slamming it in because she knew how fragile the glass was; breaking it would just be the cherry on today’s shit sundae. But once the drawer was settled in place, she turned and stomped back up the stairs, feeling the anger as a tension in her jaw and a weight on her shoulders.

She was done for today. It was nearly four o’clock, and he’d been the only customer to wander by for hours. There was no use keeping the place open if she was going to be upstairs sulking. Rey found the building key hanging where she usually kept it, on the row of nails by the entrance to her upstairs studio flat-slash-workspace, and she tromped back down the wooden stairs, heading to the front to lock up.

Rey had just put the key in the lock and turned it, and was reaching for the wooden _Open_ sign to flip it over to _Closed_ , when she realized that the man’s car was still outside. She glared at it, trying to see if he was inside it, and then caught sight of movement to her left. He was standing on the sidewalk, looking up at the building across the way, talking on his cell phone.

He hadn’t seen her watching.

Rolling her eyes, Rey flipped the sign over, and pulled down the front shades. What a fucking prick he was. Him and his whole company. There wasn’t anything in the world he could offer her that would make her change her mind. Sure, this place looked like a junk heap to most people, but it was _hers_. She’d built it out of nothing, bought the place in a fluke of a good deal when it had come up for auction, and invested all of her time and meager profits into fixing it up.

Rey turned around, and surveyed her shop. It wasn’t much, but it was everything to her. And she wasn’t going to let a prick like Ben Solo take that away.

 

* * *

The first sign that First Order Property Development was going to ruin everything had come about a year ago, when the block across the way from her shop had fallen into their clutches. Rey had been used to waking every morning, fixing her cup of tea and staring out the window at the mish-mash of multicolored three- and four-story buildings across the way. It had always been a charming, familiar sight to her: the apartment buildings; the houses that had been converted into duplexes; the Takodana food co-op on the corner. Then one day, out of nowhere, there was a wrecking crew setting up, and she’d watched in horror as the buildings had been reduced to rubble.

In place of quaint and familiar, cold steel and modern glass had risen, twenty-four stories high, blocking out her morning sunshine. Just under a year of noise and mayhem. It wasn’t that she hated the idea of more apartments, especially in this part of town, when she knew they were hard to come by, but these… these were so far out of the realm of a normal person’s price range, it was almost laughable. Good families had been forced out by rising rents, and in their place, Rey saw a steady stream of hipsters and new-money trendsetters move in, the kind of people who _thrifted_ and rode fixed-gear bikes everywhere and drank overpriced smoothies out of mason jars.

She has to stare at that stupid building every morning while she waited for her electric kettle to click off, and even if the letters hadn’t started arriving, that would’ve been more than enough to annoy her. A few people had taken to drawing on the FOPD signs and changing their logo to read _Fuck Off, Property Developers_ ; Rey privately agreed. But they couldn’t be stopped through graffiti alone, and even complaining was a dead end. The city saw potential for higher-density housing, and for most of the rest of the city, this particular neighborhood was a low-income blemish on the face of the city, with all of the justly-earned reputation that carried. People couldn’t see past that, and love its quirks and charms. Rey could, but… she understood why others saw something else.

People only saw what they wanted to see. It was the same with junk, with cities, with people. And it pissed her off.

First Order had tried to capture those quirks and repackage them, but like all outsiders who thought they could sneak in a modern eyesore and gild it as a local investment, they missed the mark by miles. There apparently was some trend in apartment buildings lately where they were given unusual names that were supposed to be charming, convey a sense of community and personality; Rey hasn’t a clue what the name they’d chosen was supposed to convey, but she’d grown to hate the logo, too. _Kylo_ , the subdued slab-serif font proclaimed, beside a picture of a wren.

Pretentious pricks.

She hated the lot of them.

And now they were here, trying to get their hands on her building. Rey sat back down at her desk upstairs, hearing when Mr. Solo’s expensive car revved to life, and watching as the black streak merged a little too fast into passing traffic. She knew it was a futile effort, but standing up to them made a point. They couldn’t erase all of the city like this. Couldn’t just… wipe them off the map, and plonk down a box with a made-up name and put a bird on it.

 _You know they can, though,_ Rey thought morosely. _It’s only a matter of time._

She picked up her tools, and then set them back down again. It was no use; she was too incensed, too frustrated, to work on anything productive.

The encounter with Mr. Solo had left her rattled, whether she wanted to admit it or not. She briefly entertained a fantasy where she’d torn that green necklace back out of his hands, pushed him out the door and told him he didn’t deserve to put his touch on anything that was hers.

But that dream, too, was futile. And anyway, there was no use getting caught up in rewriting history. Rey knew all about that trap, and knew where it led.

Rey stood up from her workbench, and slid the stool back under the desk. She looked around the room, taking in the familiar, comforting surroundings, the place she’d called home for the last handful of years: the workbench she’d installed herself into the windowed alcove, made from a massive slab of recycled cherrywood; her twin bed and nearby yellow Jenny Lind nightstand with a pile of books ranging from yellowed, vintage romance novels to technical manuals for motorcycle engine repair. There was a dresser, a sturdy old oak piece with painted ceramic drawer pulls, atop which a milk-glass vase and a tray with her various necessities sat. Windows framed in lace curtains cast a late-afternoon light across her bed’s flowery patchwork quilt, and Rey sighed, seeing the mug of tea she’d left on the windowsill that morning.

It was cold now, undoubtedly.  

She went over to pick it up and took it to the sink. The place didn’t have much in the way of an actual kitchen, and given that the whole flat was a glorified studio, it was little more than a row of cabinets under the slope of the roof along the far wall. Rey put the used tea bag into the trash can and cleaned the mug in the sink, then put it on the rack to dry. There was no dishwasher in this place, no proper oven, but she had a microwave and a toaster oven, and a little fridge, and that had been enough.

Then the market across the street had closed, and she’d had to walk six more blocks to get to the nearest grocery store, so it had suddenly become less efficient to shop for the next day or two’s meals, and she’d had to adjust her routines. Yet another annoyance, and another painful reminder that the nice family who’d run the store had been driven out, too.

Those First Order fucks.

Rey finished scrubbing out the sink, and filled the kettle once more, fixing herself another cup of tea and heading over to sit on her bed. There was a pair of armchairs and a little side table, but she preferred the bed. She pulled out her battered laptop and waited the thirty-four hours it felt like it took to boot up. Once it was on, she wiggled the charging cable to try and dislodge whatever bit of magnetic metal shaving had made its way in-between the contacts again—an unfortunate side-effect from tinkering constantly—and saw the battery icon switch over to indicate it was charging. This thing had been ancient when she’d acquired from her old neighbors before they’d moved away, and the battery life was about five minutes on a good day.

Her neighbor had acquired it from his job before they’d unceremoniously let him go; First Order had treated Finn like shit, and she sincerely hoped that he’d stolen the laptop rather than had to pay for it. It made her even more pissed off that the logo etched into the underside of the metal belonged to First Order Property Development. It was as if they’d begun laying claim to her entire life, and she had no say in it whatsoever.  

Whatever. It was a laptop, and it worked, and it didn’t matter.

 _Okay, Mr. Solo… let’s find out a little bit more about you._ Rey pulled up a browser and typed in his name, feeling her frown deepened when the search came back. Of course the first result was the company’s official website, and she read through his bio, echoing it back in a mocking voice in her mind… overseeing and managing asset acquisition and construction logistics… urban infill and new residential development… sustainable initiatives and international expansion…

Rey snorted. Buzzword bingo. How nauseatingly masturbatory.

Her gaze flicked over to the portrait placed beside the bio, taking in the somber, faintly bored expression, the expressive mouth, prominent nose, and too-long hair contrasting with the well-tailored suit and glint of silver, a tie bar, marked with the company’s hexagonal starburst logo, across a solid black tie. He looked way too young to be in charge of all of that alphabet soup, but as she clicked around the other partners’ bio pages, she saw that most of them were around the same ages, late twenties or early thirties. There was a red-haired funds manager who had an expression like someone had just insulted his cat, and a severe-looking blonde woman with a short, sleek haircut and vibrant red lipstick who was listed as a managing partner.

Rey had seen all she cared to see of the rest of the team. She clicked around the site, finding the link to the upcoming projects. There, her stomach turned as she saw the address listed of their first project.

Her block.

She clicked on the page, and the rendering came up. ‘A mixed-use apartment building, with 262 planned units, ideally situated for vibrant city living…’

Rey made a noise of disgust, and closed the page. But the rendering of the building seemed to be burned into her retinas. It had been cold and black and modern, something that she wouldn’t have hated, maybe in some other city, some other place. But not here. A place like this, it deserved to see something organic and beautiful, something that spoke to the true heart of the community.

 _What community, though?_ Rey thought. _I should’ve listened, when Finn and Poe left. And Maz, and Rose and Paige…_

Rey had stubbornly stayed on when, one by one, family after family had moved out of the city. She missed them, though. She missed the Tico sisters’ monthly dinner-and-board-game nights, and she missed returning Finn and Poe’s enthusiastic corgi, BeeBee, back to their place. Finn and Poe had lived in the house right next door to her, twin in layout to her home and shop, but in much better condition; instead of being gutted and converted to a shop and loft, it still had the charms of the original, with wide bookcases, millwork and hardwood floors that glowed.

She missed sitting out with them in their shared backyard and speculating over the various sexual escapades that their retiree neighbor, Maz, had gotten up to. She’d had one gentleman caller in particular, a big, tall guy with shaggy, Jerry-Garcia hair, who must’ve been twice her height, and lord, if Rey didn’t want to know how the logistics of _that_ worked… And sometimes, Finn had vented about working at First Order, and Rey had sympathized, but she hadn’t really understood.

She understood well enough now.

Rey took a sip of her tea, and set the mug back down on the windowsill. Enough of the official messaging. Back on the search results page, Rey started to scroll through everything else she could find about this Ben Solo guy, gleaning information.

Okay, maybe it was more ‘obsessively hate-scrolling’ than actual gleaning. But there was just so much to go through. He was the son of a former state senator, and had been thrust into the spotlight during her first election campaign twenty years ago when he’d been at that exceptionally gangly age between childhood and teenagehood. There were plenty of photos of him as a mop-haired kid, and no real shortage of them at the age he was now. It was almost like he was two completely different people. In the more current photos, he was pictured near fast cars, or at a charity gala with a beautiful woman on his arm who looked like a model. A different one each time, of course. Rey found herself forming a picture of him in her mind: An entitled, spoiled kid who’d never been told no, probably had been raised by the help, and had more money than sense.

Or compassion.

Enough was enough; if Rey kept going down this path, she’d see sunset and still be stewing over him. She closed out of the search page and the various other links she’d opened as tabs, and pulled up her Etsy page, checking the current stats.

No sales. Nothing, this whole week. Rey sighed. It was going to be another lean month, like last month had been, at the rate things were going. Thankfully, her house was paid for, but there was always a list of repairs to be done, not to mention water, sewer, heat, and the cheapest internet plan available. She’d already pared down her grocery budget as much as possible, and with the market gone she’d had to adjust even further. As if on cue, her stomach growled, and Rey shot a glance over at the fridge. There was one more portion of lentil soup in there, but maybe if she watered it down she could get two nights’ worth…

 _You’ve got two hundred dollars sitting downstairs in the register_ , her thoughts taunted. _Surely you can eat the soup, and go for groceries tomorrow…_

But thinking about the money made her think about him again. Ben Solo. With his dark eyes and his stupid hair and his face, and his hands, neatly-manicured nails like a man who’d never cleaned engine grease a day in his life. Her face flushed with some unknown emotion, and Rey was quick to categorize the response as hatred.

She got up from the bed, though, and grabbed the container of soup from the fridge. Rey dumped it into a bowl and put it into the microwave, finding the last end of the baguette she’d bought too many days ago and frowning when it felt like a brick in her hands. No matter; she’d be dipping it in the soup anyway, it was fine if it was stale.

Eating her dinner slowly as she sat cross-legged on her bed, Rey pulled up cat videos and clips from her favorite shows until the sky outside was dark. She washed her dishes and put them on the rack, and then changed out of her tunic and leggings, into her pajamas. Groceries tomorrow, and then she’d make a plan. She’d find a way to resist this stupid First Order if it was the last thing she did.


	2. Chapter 2

Rey’s eyes lingered longingly on one of the nicer cans of soup on the shelf for just a moment, before bypassing it for the sale cans of store-brand beans.

Three for a dollar; she counted out six of them and put them in her basket, already scanning the shelf to see if any of the others would be on sale too. The bulk aisle yielded a careful scoop of red lentils and another bag of rice—not the brown kind or the mixed, fancy rice, but the minute kind. Cheapest available, but no less delicious. A handful of that, cooked in a can of soup, wasn’t half bad for dinner.

She got a half carton of eggs, and smiled at the guy who ran the bakery, earning a half-price sticker onto yesterday’s unsold loaf of french bread. There was something to be said for using her charm when and where it occasionally worked, and Rey wasn’t ashamed to do it. Canned vegetables were always cheaper than frozen, though she hated the way they often tasted, and would’ve preferred to get the fresh ones.

But she got a smile and a wave from the barista at the in-store coffee shop, who handed Rey a packet of pastries she’d secreted out. They were only a day off, and would last for a while in her fridge at home. Strictly speaking, the barista wasn’t _supposed_ to do it, but they’d just get thrown away otherwise, so what did it matter?

She’d just been looking down at the cloth bag and putting the pastries into it, atop the carton of eggs, when a familiar baritone voice behind her made her jump.

“Can I get a large drip coffee with an extra shot?”

Rey didn’t have to turn around to know who’s standing behind her, but she turned anyway; when she looked up at Ben Solo’s face, she couldn’t even keep the scowl from forming on her own. Although, a second later, when he glanced down at her, she saw from the hint of a smug smile on his mouth that he wasn’t at all surprised to see her.

“What are you doing here?” Rey said.

“Ordering coffee,” he replied. “If you’re not in line. I just assumed you were finished.”

“I’m not ordering anything.”

“Good,” he said. And then, to the barista: “How much?”

“Um, that’ll be three seventy-five,” the barista replied.“D-do you want t-to… cream? I mean room, for cream?”

“No, thank you,” came his smooth reply. “Black is fine.”

Rey looked back at her and saw a telltale flush on the girl’s cheeks. _Really. He’s not anything to get worked up over, believe me._

Rey shifted to the side and watched as he pulled out his wallet again, handing over a card this time, then smiling almost shyly when the barista indicated where he’s meant to insert the chip-end into the reader. He thanked the barista by name, reading it off of her name tag in that dark-chocolate voice, and the poor girl’s face flushed even more red. She stood there for a moment, and then seemed to remember that he’s ordered something, and it’s _her_ job to make it; she turned, and fumbled at the stack of cups, searching for a sharpie.

“Why are you _here_ , I mean?” Rey asked again. “Scoping out another local business to destroy? Planning on razing this to the ground and putting up some kind of… organic market with ten-dollar wheatgrass shots and a kombucha bar?”

“Getting groceries.” Mr. Solo held up a pair of plastic bags he held in one hand; they were emblazoned with the store’s logo. “And anyway, this is a regional chain with a well-established coffee company in it, somehow I don’t think it’s in any danger.”

“But my home is?”

He leveled his dark gaze on her. “We’ve offered you a fair price. More than fair, even. I’ve heard enough about you from my boss, and he can’t understand why you’ve refused me. Refused our offers, I mean. It doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t _have_ to make sense to you,” Rey countered. “I don’t want your money.”

“Hmm.”

Mr. Solo watched her for a moment longer, and then looked around the store with a neutral expression. Taking a few steps away from her, Rey hoped that the conversation was over, but no, he’d just gone to stand by the counter where the drinks came up. He was still not looking at her; Rey took in the change in his clothing with some curiosity, hating herself at how she responded to the scrumptious fit of the soft-looking sweater he was wearing. It was black, of course. Well, charcoal. Same difference. He had paired it with black skinny jeans that were scrunched up a little bit above a pair of black boots—how a guy with legs that long found jeans that were _too_ long was… not something Rey gave a shit about, honestly, really.

Her gaze trailed back up, over the shapely line of his calves and thighs, over curve of his ass—and then she realized that he’d been watching her little perv session.

Rey’s face flared with heat and anger filled her veins. And yet, instead of leaving well enough alone she stepped over to him, hosting her groceries higher on her shoulder as they pinched under the weight of all the cans in the bag. It was like she was tethered to him by a cord, dragged along into his absurdity. Biologically incapable of _not_ needling him.

Was there something in the nearby floral section? Some weird pollen, that was making her act like this? Rey scowled.

“So why are you buying groceries at _my_ neighborhood store?” Rey demanded. “Don’t you have some little old ladies to evict, or puppies to kick, something?”

“I needed groceries,” came his mild reply. That smirk was on his lips, and Rey had never wanted to slap someone more than she did now, which was saying something.

The barista put the coffee up on the counter, and Rey rolled her eyes at the slightly breathless way the girl said his name. _Ben_. She made it sound like a plea and a suggestion, all in one.

Rey growled in annoyance, and shifted her fabric bag over to the other shoulder. She wasn’t getting anything out of him, and this whole conversation was fucking pointless. Frustrated, Rey turned, and headed towards the door.

It was sunny outside. A nice enough day, with lazy white clouds spreading themselves across a crisp blue sky. All other things considered, it would’ve put her in a good mood, walking home on a day like today.

Present company being what it was, however, it didn’t.

And it took her approximately ten paces to realize that he was following her.

“Are you stalking me now? Is that your technique?” Rey scoffed as he came into step with her, his long strides shortening to match hers.

“No,” he said.

Rey rolled her eyes, working her thumb beneath the fabric strap of her bag, holding it to her body in an effort to keep it from clanking against her hip as her steps sped up. The bag was between them, some useless barrier from the parasitic filth that had, for some reason, decided to shadow her. With his all-black getup he looked like some kind of shadow, too. He seemed to be enjoying answering her by not answering her. Her scowl deepened.

They walked together for five blocks, stopping at the crosswalks, waiting for traffic. His stride was plainly longer than hers, because his legs were absurdly longer than hers, but he kept roughly beside her as they went along. Every step they took made her ire increase, and she turned over countless increasingly rude things to say to tell him off, to provoke him, without being able to decide on which would be the most effective. Why he was doing it had ceased to matter; _that_ he was doing it was enough to make her scream.

Somehow, she held it together. Somehow—until they both rounded the final corner, and Rey saw the moving van which had been parked on the street in front of her house.

Rey stopped in her tracks. He walked a few paces further, before stopping, and turning back to look at her.

“What the _fuck_ is this?” Rey exclaimed.

Rey took another step forward, and at that moment, the seam in her handmade bag decided to give out. Cans clattered to the ground, rolling off of the sidewalk and into the street. Lentils and rice scattered, their flimsy plastic bags tearing, and a jar of peanut butter made it valiantly past the double-yellow lines before being hit by a passing Kia. Her stomach seemed to drop out as well, and her throat closed up in rage and surprise; that had been her grocery budget for the entire week, and just like that, most of it had been destroyed. She crouched down, trying to pick up the cans within reach, scooping up the lentils and rice and pouring them back into the bag, but it slipped from her shaking hands and spilled further.

It was pointless.

The bread had fallen into a smear of something that looked like motor oil, but maybe if she broke off the corner of it…

“Here, let me,” a warm, low voice came from above her. Big hands reached down, gathering up the cans that had rolled away from her and setting them safely on the ground. He set his own bags down next, and was separating them from how they’d been double-bagged. He reached for one of her cans, and Rey flinched away from him on instinct.

“I don’t want your help!” Rey cried, her voice cracking with emotion. She couldn’t bear to look in his eyes, to look a rich boy in his eyes and see pity there. It was unbearable, and it made her want to punch something.

Slowly, he set the spare bag down.

And then he picked up his own two grocery bags, and stood up. Rey was still crouching on the ground, staring with tear-filled eyes at his very nice shoes as they blurred out of focus.

She would not let herself cry; There was no use crying over spilled lentils.

Rey sniffed. Waiting for the ground to swallow her up too. Waiting for him to just go, and leave her alone.

“I’m sorry…” he said quietly. And then he turned, and walked away.

Rey wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She reached for the empty bags he’d left, and carefully gathered up what was left of her groceries in to them. She took the bread, and the handful of lentils and rice, and the rest of the dented cans. Then she stood, with all the pride and dignity she could muster, and looked down the sidewalk towards where the moving van had been parked.

It wasn’t parked in front of her place, she saw that now; he wasn’t trying to move her out. It was parked right next door.

He was moving himself in.

* * *

Rey got inside and upstairs and had set the bags down on the counter before she allowed herself to give over to all of the emotions currently fighting to get out. She sobbed, and felt like screaming, and there no words to explain the swirl of frustration and impotent rage she felt. It was the lowest trick, the absolute scummiest, most pathetic, most fucking shitty thing she could’ve imagined, moving into the place that Poe and Finn had rented for two years, where they had lived and loved, where she had sat and enjoyed bowlfuls of Poe’s unbelievably amazing family recipes at their mid-century modern dining set.

Listening to jazz. Playing Cards Against Humanity with the Tico sisters. Watching black-and-white sci-fi films and laughing about the rubber masks on the aliens.

That place had been filled with warmth and peace for her, the nicer sister to her own ramshackle home, and it had reminded her that even an old place, with good bones, could be loved back into beauty and warmth. That had been her goal, and now Ben _fucking_ Solo was taking possession of it.

It felt like such a calculated, cruel move, even though rationally she knew that he had never known Poe and Finn personally, and didn’t have that association to tarnish.

To him, this was probably just like some camping trip. Roughing it with the poors, to amuse himself and pester her until she gave up. Belatedly she realized that _his_ house had an upstairs window that looked directly into the window over _her_ bed, and she went over, quickly, to close her curtains.

She wasn’t going to give him any insight into her life. No more than he already had.

_Which, let’s face it, is plenty. He’s seen your shop, he’s seen your groceries, he’s seen you scrabble on the ground for a handful of lentils… what else does he need to know?_

Rey sat down slowly on the bed. She looked up at the sad sack of groceries on the counter. The logo on the bag reminded her of the incongruous gentleness of his voice, the broadness of his hands as they’d blurred in her teary gaze, and it made her hate him even more fiercely.

 _You’ll have your pride to chew on, girl,_ a voice in her head taunted her, a voice that sounded entirely too similar to Maz’s. _Will that fill your belly?_

If she took the money… ah, that was the temptation, wasn’t it? If she took the money, took seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, it would be more money than she’d ever had in her life. Briefly, the ideas that flashed before her thoughts seemed like the impossible suddenly being made possible: She could buy a car, buy a house, go to college. Or just go to trade school, get the certifications that would allow her to work as an electrician… She could go anywhere, do anything.

That amount of money was… it wasn’t a real sum, to her. It was such a high number Rey couldn’t imagine what she would do with it first. She’d have to take it to the bank in, what, a giant sack? Like some kind of cartoon character?

Rey scoffed, and shook her head at her own ridiculousness. No, of course it’d be a check. And that check would be imaginary, because her pride and her work had no price. He’d have to sneak here in the dead of night and put her in that moving van if he wanted her to go.

_Why does this matter so much to you? Why is this the hill you want to die on?_

Rey didn’t have an answer for that. Other than that it simply… was.

* * *

Dinner was a piece of bread and a warmed-up can of cream of... something... soup. Rey threw the dirty half of the loaf into the trash, and all the lentils and rice, because she’d found gravel in them and hadn’t had the heart to try and sort through it. At least the pasties had been fine. She’d found them in the bottom of the bag, still in their plastic packaging with the logo of the coffee shop. He must’ve put them in the bag, found them before she’d noticed them.

And he was in the house next door to her, right now, fixing his own dinner, which undoubtedly was better than hers. He was probably eating filet mignon and lobster and caviar.

Rey laughed a soft, bitter laugh, and corrected herself. A pampered twerp like him probably didn’t even know how to cook. Then she quieted, and looked down at her own dinner.

She didn’t really know how to cook, either. But it was the principle of the thing.

Principles. What fucking use were those? Rey sighed, and put the spoon down into the bowl. It clinked against the chipped ceramic rim like a sad little bird.

Anyone looking in on her right now would think she was a fool. Whatever the opposite of a hypocrite was, that’d be how they’d see her: Instead of the kind of person who made a stand on principle, and broke it, she was the kind of person who sat beneath the shadow of her principles, and wondered why she couldn’t stand up tall, or see the sun. Rey could acknowledge this, and knew it was the truth, but still…

 _I have dreams for this place, and that hasn’t changed,_ Rey thought. _I can’t just give up on those. Give up on myself._

Rey got up, and put the bowl in the sink, promising herself she’d wash it in the morning. She walked over to her workbench, just looking at her projects and ideas and sketches. Most people would look at her life and think that it was just a scattering of junk. But it had purpose. It gave her joy. Seeking and creating, finding beauty in ordinary things, the kind of things that most people would pass over or discard. She wasn’t like the First Order; she didn’t just bulldoze over things to place a nice, shiny new box down in their place. New wasn’t always better than old, and there were plenty of things that still had use in them, if people just tried. If they could just see beyond the need to discard things they didn’t want anymore. There had to be value in those things. Wasn’t there?

Outside, Rey could see the logo of the Kylo across the street, shining in the lights of passing cards. Mr. Solo had been the lead developer on that project, Rey had read. Now she knew, that was his project. This was all _his_ fault.

* * *

Rey slept fitfully that night. Her dreams seemed to be fragmented; one minute she was trying to grab for her tools, but found them growing too large, or too small, or they’d turn to vapor and slip through her hands entirely; the next, she was watching as broader hands clasped hers, and drew her close. Then they’d picked her up, like she weighed nothing at all, and dropped her into a plastic grocery bag.

Startling, Rey gasped for air as she woke from the dream. She was tangled and tied up—in her sheets, that was all. She lay there on the bed, listening to the rain and the sound of passing traffic outside. Even her dreams weren’t safe from him. Ben _fucking_ Solo. She rolled to her side and tried to steady her breathing.

Somewhere around five in the morning, Rey stopped trying to go back to sleep and got up, fixing herself some strong black tea and grabbing a granola bar from the box on the counter. She double-checked that the curtains by her bed were still drawn and pulled off her sweat-soaked pajamas, then went into the little bathroom off of her upstairs room and scrubbed at her face and body with cold water. This bathroom wasn’t up to code, and Rey knew that the equivalent space in Poe and Finn’s house—she would not call it _his_ house—was actually a closet. The plumbing was suspect at best, and there was a much nicer bathroom downstairs, original to the home and properly constructed, which she reserved for customers. This one had a pedestal sink and a toilet, and it had a bathtub, but Rey’d stopped using it because she was certain that it was leaking and would one day fall through the floor directly onto her register downstairs.

That was the last thing she needed.

Rey brushed her hair and pulled it back into a bun, then left the bathroom and went to her dresser, pulling out a pair of dark brown leggings and a loose-fitting tan tunic. It was early yet, but the sun was finally coming up, and she was determined to center herself and at least try and fit a good face on things. There was one thing that never failed to get her in a better mood.

She picked up her rolled-up yoga mat, and headed downstairs.

When Finn and Poe had still lived next door, the landlord who’d owned the building had allowed them to add on a little stone patio off of what was their dining room and kitchen. The back of the ground floor of Rey’s home and shop had long since been torn out, the kitchen gone, converted into storage space for the bigger pieces she’d still been trying to repair. But the door was still there, and, to surprise her one year for her birthday, the guys had come over and added a stone patio for her as well, the same design as theirs. Rey remembered with affection how much she’d been blown away by their kindness and thoughtful gesture; she remembered looking at the herringbone-patterned stones, bordered by the little azaleas and pots with flower bulbs in them, and hugging both of the men so tightly, unable to put into words what this had meant to her.

Now, it was one of her favorite spots. She’d come down here every morning, so long as the weather was dry, and roll out her thrift-store yoga mat, and—

“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”  

Rey stopped, her hand still on the doorknob, staring out of the window into her new neighbor’s backyard. This was… this had to be a joke, right? Because why else would Ben Solo be outside, wearing a black tank and loose-fitting black pants, holding a perfect extended side-angle pose on his own fucking yoga mat, if life itself wasn’t a great, cosmic joke?

Suddenly she felt as if she really had been tied up in one of those suffocating grocery bags from her dreams. Her chest felt tight, her face flushed with emotion as she watched him come out of the pose slowly, transitioning to extended triangle. His long arm extended up to the sky, and his gaze followed it; his form was perfect, steady and sure, and Rey knew that he’d clearly been doing this for some time. He wasn’t some beginner, who’d picked this up just to mess with her. Rationally she knew that he hadn’t been stalking her, wouldn’t know that this was her thing, yoga outside in the rising sun, on a patio made by men who she missed dearly. Her friends.

Friends he’d all but evicted.

Rey kept watching. It was like she couldn’t look away. He came out of the pose and settled into warrior 2. Arm extended, gaze focused… shirt riding up just a little as he moved, exposing a line of pale skin just above the waistline of his pants. Most guys she was attracted to tended to be lean, inverted triangles, with runner’s physiques and thoughtful eyes. This guy was built on a completely different scale; there was no leanness to his hips, and yet there was no wasted space on his body at all. His long legs were sturdy and strong, his feet bare on the black mat. His thighs strained against the pants with just enough of a suggestive outline to make Rey start to blush. She hastily tore her eyes away from staring at him, and looked back up at his face.

Fuck. Had he seen her?

Rey pulled back away from the window, and tried to still her racing heart. Why? Fucking why did he have to take _this_ from her, too? She could do her yoga upstairs, and often did, when the weather was crappy. But the sun was bright and beautiful, and if she retreated now, wouldn’t it be like giving him a win?

Rey looked back over at him, seeing how effortlessly he shifted from downward-facing dog into a plank so solidly held it made her seethe with jealousy. His arms were—they were arms, okay? Men had arms. This was a relatively normal human thing, having arms. And feet. And muscles. And pale skin and freckles and—

 _Fuck_. Fucking fuck on a stick.

She turned around, and went back upstairs. She wasn’t in the mood to do this today. And now, instead of feeling centered and optimistic and resolute, she felt like she wasn’t even in the mood to do anything this morning. So she set the rolled-up mat against the wall by her dresser, and went to her workbench instead.

He couldn’t take this from her, at least. And tinkering _was_ a kind of meditation. She pulled the tray of tools forward and examined the piece she’d been working on: A vintage flash handle.

Rey didn’t know much about old photography equipment, but she’d checked on Etsy and found that for some reason, these went for a ton of money, so this one was worth cleaning and reassembling. Finally, Rey slipped into a relaxed, peaceful mood for the first time since Mr. Solo had shown up in her store. When she was happy with it, she pulled out her laptop and started working on the listing for the item. Her cracked smartphone still took reasonably good pictures, and Rey was so fully immersed in her work that she barely registered the sad chirping of the waterlogged buzzer.

Someone was downstairs.

Rey set her phone down and leapt to her feet, retrieving the key from the wall and making her way downstairs. She had forgotten to unlock and open the shop—which was probably for the best, given that she was so distracted, but so few people had come in, she’d stopped expecting any foot traffic at all.

For a brief moment, Rey worried that it was Mr. Solo, coming by again to bully her, but when she pulled up the blinds and looked through the window, she was relieved to see that it wasn’t. Rey smiled apologetically at the woman on the other side as she unlocked the door, and flipped over the sign from _Closed_ to _Open_ , and pulled on the somewhat creaky door knob, opening the front door.

“I’m so sorry, I can’t believe I forgot to open up this morning,” Rey said.

The dark-haired woman smiled back at her. “It’s not a problem.”

Rey recognized her, she realized: she was wearing a light jacket over her orange and white uniform shirt, but Rey realized this was Jess, one of the checkers that worked at the grocery store up the street.

She was carrying two heavy grocery bags, and had her own backpack slung over one shoulder. Rey stepped aside, and let Jess come into the store.

“Wow, this place is amazing!”

“Thanks,” Rey replied. “Is there anything I can help you find?”

“I was just heading home from my morning shift, actually, and I remembered it’s my girlfriend’s mom’s birthday tomorrow,” Jess explained, her eyes wandering over all of the clocks, lamps, and a shelf of turntables and old records. “I had a friend tell me that you make jewelry, and I thought I’d check it out and see if there was something she might like?”

Rey smiled. “Yeah, they’re up front, I can show you what I have.”

“Thanks,” Jess said. And then she held out the grocery bags to Rey. “Also, you left some things on the checkstand last time you were in. Brance said you left before he realized they were yours. I thought I’d bring them by since I was coming over here.”

Rey looked down at the bags, and then back up, into Jess’ dark eyes. She knew for a fact that she hadn’t forgotten anything at the store yesterday; Rey’d counted each item and paid with one of Mr. Solo’s crisp hundred-dollar bills, counted the change back and loaded everything on the belt back into her now-ripped cloth bag. But she took the bags, feeling their weight, not understanding.

“Thank you,” Rey said softly.

Jess nodded at her, then smiled again. “My girlfriend’s mom… she, um, really likes the color red…”

It was as awkward of a transition as either of them could manage, but Rey was grateful for it. She walked Jess back to the counter and set the bags behind it, pulling out the tray. She could still see the impression on the velvet where the green necklace had been. There was a beautiful piece with three oval garnets in it, a little less dramatic and expensive as the emerald had been. Jess cooed over the jewelry, and agreed that the garnet piece was the best choice. Rey told her the price, and Jess pulled a single, crisp, one hundred-dollar bill out of her purse, as if neither of them knew where that had come from. Who it had come from.

Rey packaged up the necklace, and Jess left with it, and the bell jingled when the door closed behind her. Then, crouching down, Rey looked at the bags of groceries.

A generous scoop of rice. Another one of lentils. Cans of soup, store brand, and two jars of organic peanut butter. One creamy, one chunky.

That _fucker_.

He could’ve just left well enough alone, but no, he had to cook up some scheme to… to shame her, to show that he was richer, could throw around hundreds like a tree in fall threw leaves. Like money was no object.

Like she was something to be bought.

Rey left the bags on the floor behind her counter, and stood up tall and sure. This had to stop.


	3. Chapter 3

“What, exactly, are you trying to prove?”

Rey stood there in the doorway, glaring up at Mr. Solo. The reading glasses he was wearing lent him a somewhat professorial look, which had startled Rey and made her feel like she was some errant student, bothering him during office hours. Begging for extra credit. He’d changed into a black dress shirt, rolled up to reveal his forearms, and a pair of slate-gray trousers; his black hair was damp and slightly wavy from a shower, and Rey hated that she’d both noticed and found it appealing. His feet were still bare. She was too mad, though, to be distracted. 

“What?”

“The groceries,” Rey said. “You paid Jess to deliver replacement groceries. And you probably paid her to come buy a necklace, too. What are you playing at?”

“Maybe she just—”

“Don’t fucking bullshit me, Solo.” Rey pointed a finger at him, and he took a half-step back, his eyes widening in surprise and amusement. “You think you can bribe me? Fix everything with money? Why are you doing this?”

He opened his mouth, and then closed it, mouth working a little as his eyes searched her face, briefly taking a detour along her body, before connecting with her ire-filled gaze. “I… Because I knew what dropping those groceries cost you. And I… I felt bad about it. I knew you wouldn’t take charity from me, so I had someone else do it. You took them, right?”

“Of course I—” Rey snapped her mouth shut, realizing she’d been caught. 

Amusement and pleasure colored his cheeks. “Good. I mean, I would’ve put in a few more things, but I thought if there was an entire cheesecake in there, you would’ve thrown it at my head.”

Rey reluctantly agreed with him on this. Then she sighed, and felt herself relax the smallest fraction. “I’m lactose-intolerant, anyway.”

The corner of his mouth quirked. “I’ll file that away.”

“No, you won’t, because you’re not ever doing that again.”

He put up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Your word is my command.”

“Don’t mock me,” Rey bit back. “If that was really true, you’d leave, now, and stop pestering me.”

“You came to ring  _ my _ doorbell, if you’ll remember.”

“Because you won’t stop interfering with my life!” Rey wanted to tear her hair out in frustration—better yet, she wanted to tear  _ his  _ hair out. “Why are you even here? You could be across the street, in your precious Kylo—which, by the way, is a stupid name for a building—”

At this, he looked genuinely affronted. “What’s wrong with Kylo?”

“It’s not a real name!” Rey growled. “It doesn’t even mean... You could be up in a penthouse, and instead you’re...”

She leaned to the side to look in the house, expecting to see lush furniture and excess, and finding herself somewhat surprised to see that he’d just put a twin mattress on the floor of the living room, topped with a plain, dark maroon blanket. Beside that, there was nothing more than a lamp, a little folding table, and cheap plastic chair. A laptop was set on the table, with a mug beside it and an open notebook. It was, all things considered, a rather spartan arrangement. 

“D’you want to come in?” he asked her, amusement dripping off of his dark voice. 

“No, thank you.” Rey looked back at him, unable to meet his gaze and settling her eyes on the second button of his dress shirt instead; it was mother-of-pearl, and this shiny prettiness helped focus her absurd rage back up to the levels where it belonged. 

He cleared his throat. Seemed to remember himself, where he was; perhaps the attraction Rey felt wasn’t entirely one-sided. But she couldn’t think of that now. There were much more important things at stake. 

“Miss Johnson, do you want to know what I’m doing here?” he asked. “I am working. I am doing my  _ job _ . It is my job to ensure that this block is cleared of all buildings; it is my job to find a mutually-agreeable offer so that you vacate your residence. I assumed that.. If some of your more pressing needs were taken care of, you might be more amenable to a reasonable offer. But you don’t like it that I’m interfering with your life? That’s fine. But I don’t like it that you are interfering with mine.” 

Rey’s mouth gaped. “You’re a fucking entitled bastard, do you know that? You don’t have any earthly idea how to empathize with another human being. You think you can push me out, just take what you want with no consequences whatsoever. You’re an arrogant… spoiled, little  _ prick _ !”

His face flushed with anger. “I’m—”

“I knew you were an asshole the moment I saw you. I knew exactly who you were.” 

“You have no idea who I am,” he began, but Rey cut across him, unable to keep the angry words from flying from her lips.

“I know  _ everything  _ I need to know about you.” 

And before he could even form a response, Rey had already turned to walk away.

* * *

It felt good, so damn good, to stomp away in a huff.

_ She _ was interfering with  _ him _ ?

_ Really _ ? 

_ That _ was all he had to say to her? Rey sat down on her bed, dust particles rising in the light; she balled her fist up and punched the bed as hard as she could. The grocery bags were still sitting on the counter, taunting her. Why would he do that for her, and then tell her  _ she _ was interfering? Wouldn’t it be more advantageous to starve her out?

Did he think to win her over? Distract her? _ ...your more pressing needs, _ that’s what he had said to her. 

That smug, condescending prick. As if he knew anything about what she needed, or wanted, or felt at all. He clearly was just trying to throw his power around, to show her that her  _ pressing concerns _ were nothing in the face of his wealth and advantage. That had to be it. 

But even as the righteous anger welled up inside of her, Maz’s wry voice echoed in her thoughts:  _ Your anger burns brightly, and your motives might be just, but that fire will consume you, if you let it. _

“Fuck,” Rey said aloud, to no one. Maz always had been entirely too insightful, even if those words had originally been about the futility of protesting the groundbreaking of what had become the Kylo building across the street. The same wisdom applied. Because the same problem still loomed in front of her. Blocking her path.  

Rey stewed in her own rage for a good five minutes longer, and when she found no easy answers, she got up off the bed, and put the groceries away in the cupboard. Even if they had come from a heartless predator, the groceries would taste the same either way.

* * *

The next handful of days dragged by slowly, with little contact between the two of them, and very little change in Rey’s opinions or her resolve. She got a few sales from walk-ins over the weekend, and about a dozen through online sales, which wasn’t half bad. There seemed to be a surge in popularity of some of the records she had in stock; these things tended to go in cycles.

One week, it had been chip-and-dip trays. The next, watches. Briefly, back around New Years’, there’d been a run on hats and accessories. Probably a themed party. And those all would probably end up in a dumpster, too, before January was even out the door. 

Oh well. People bought these things, and she really had no say over what they did with them once they owned them. 

Things had been pretty steady for a while. Steady enough that she could start to save and budget for more essential repairs and improvements. However, since  _ Mad Men _ had gone off the air, the sheen of nostalgia had faded a bit. And then the water heater had gone, and then there was that broken window upstairs... Things added up so quickly in a house like this. She’d thought about scouring garage sales in the suburbs, scouting for vintage furniture and maybe trying to broaden her store in that direction, hoping that she could pick up the skills to learn refinishing and upholstery, but there was just so much stuff downstairs already, Rey didn’t think she had the space to pick up another hobby. 

And to be honest with herself, she knew she didn’t have the money to invest in it, the way sales were going. She wasn’t at all certain she’d make any of it back. 

It had been a real stroke of luck finding this place at all; many of the things inside had come with the house, which had been at auction after the hoarder who’d lived there all his life had died. The house needed work. It was old, and crumbling, and missing bits of wallboard and had mismatched fixtures and oddly-painted and wallpapered walls, but it had been cheap as hell when Rey had won the bidding for it. She was a homeowner, and nothing could take that away. 

Not even the stupid First Order. 

Speaking of which…

Rey was up in the front of her store one sunny afternoon, a few days after her new neighbor had moved in, trying in vain to organize the display of colorful vintage rotary phones she’d brought out, when she caught sight of a red-haired man in a suit. She put a name to a face instantly, remembering his weasel-like expression from the employee page of the First Order Property Development website: Hux. 

When he hesitated briefly in front of Rey’s place, she held her breath, narrowing herself behind the wall and hoping that he didn’t try to come in, too, and  _ persuade _ her. But he only stopped for a moment, frowning at her front door, before continuing on down to the place where his co-worker was currently residing. 

Curiosity got the better of her, almost instantly. Normally, Rey couldn’t imagine attempting to eavesdrop on someone else’s private conversations, but this was a matter of life and… well, not death. But life and livelihood, certainly.

It was, all things considered, worthy espionage. 

She slipped over to the other side of the house. The layout downstairs was mostly open, except for the load-bearing walls that the original owner had surely been advised not to demolish, but the floor transitions easily delineated where the rooms once had been. Rey took a step down, half-heartedly noting that she needed to replace the yellow caution tape on the floor and probably add a handrail, and went into what she suspected had once been a front sitting room. There was a window here, one she could open ever so carefully, and hear anything that was said on her neighbor’s front porch. 

(She’d learned this trick purely by accident. When Finn and Poe had lived there, Rey had discovered that she could hear them murmur their sweet nothings, and do more than that on occasion, on their front porch swing, very late at night… cute, but TMI.) 

Rey parted the heavy damask curtains, sneezing a little at the kicked-up dust filled the air, and peered out. 

Ah ha. Success. The red-haired man in the suit was standing on the porch. And Rey could just see Mr. Solo’s profile. 

Rey didn’t feel guilty at all as she pushed the old glass window up, wood creaking only a tiny bit in the ancient frame. 

She pushed her ear down to the gap in the window, crouching as stealthily as possible, not giving a shit that if someone walked into her store right now and saw her, they’d think she was absolutely mental, hiding behind a dented Ikea bookshelf covered in ceramic figurines, eavesdropping like a goddamn hobbit. 

“...wants to know why the demolition has been delayed,” the ginger was saying. His voice was nasal and posh and loud enough that Rey could clearly make it out. “We’ve had to push back the crew again, and you haven’t sent in a word about what you’re doing here at all. What’s going on?”

Mr. Solo replied. And Rey frowned; it was just too low, or softly-spoken, that she couldn’t make it out. 

No matter. A one-sided conversation still had useful information. 

“Ben, don’t be ridiculous,” Hux replied. “What other way? You didn’t have any problems with the other residents, why is this one still holding out?”

Rey narrowed her eyes. It gave her a perverse amount of satisfaction to know that she was frustrating Hux as well. These developers, they deserved a good slap of reality and conscience, to remind them that what they were doing was awful and exploitative. And maybe it was partially because she hadn’t felt brave enough to stand up to them when the Kylo building had gone up, but Rey felt strong enough now. This was her turf. She had the higher ground. 

“Just go over there, and make the offer again,” the red-haired man continued, in response to whatever Mr. Solo had said. “Did she not understand it? Or is she trying to…”

Mr. Solo must have cut him off at this. Rey looked out the dusty, wavy glass, and saw that they’d taken a step or two further away from her range of earshot. Well, whatever offer he made, she already knew she’d refuse it. She wasn’t going to be driven out of her home. 

“He’s not going to like this,” Hux replied. And Rey smiled. 

“I don’t give a shit if he does!” came Mr. Solo’s loud, exasperated reply; Rey could probably hear that on the other side of the house. “You can tell Snoke that I’ve got this under control. This is my project. I’ve got it handled.”

“I’ll be sure to relay that message,” Hux coldly responded. “Haven’t you considered just…” 

Then, they were further out of earshot. Rey watched them until they went to the other side of the front porch, and finally stood up. She wiped her hands on her pants, dust and grime making a mess on the linen fabric. Even with only half the story, Rey had a nearly-complete picture of the situation in her mind. 

Mr. Solo was clearly orchestrating some kind of plan to get her under his thumb. That had to be it. Hux wanted him to just go over and be direct, but no, Mr. Solo was doing something underhanded… manipulative, even. Rey was sure of it. They had tried one tactic, and now they would adjust. Try something else. Try to wear her down, try to drive her away. Rey was pretty confident that people like that would let nothing stand in their way. They’d do just about anything to take what they wanted. 

At least, that was the easiest conclusion to draw. 

But even if it wasn’t the whole truth, Rey didn’t care. She wasn’t selling. No groceries or bribes or… manipulations were going to change her mind about that.

* * *

Five o’clock came and went.

So had Hux. He’d left shortly after that, and Rey hadn’t heard a peep from Mr. Solo’s side, nor had any customers come in. Her Etsy page was dead, too. Everything had a lazy sort of heat about it, the day melting away like a popsicle left on the sidewalk. There was a feeling of heaviness in the air, the pressure of an oncoming thunderstorm. Rey hoped that it rained, but not too much; there was probably a new leak in her roof, and her love of the storm had to be tempered by her very real desire to not wake up in a puddle. 

At about five-thirty, she thought she heard her neighbor’s car leave; it returned about fifteen minutes later. Still, nothing. 

Rey was in the back of the shop, curled up with an engrossing sci-fi novel about space wizards and prophecies and redemption, when her front door opened. 

“Hello?”

She jumped at the voice, instinct making her fearful and panicked. How had she forgotten to lock up? The book was good, but it wasn’t  _ that _ good—and besides, she was smarter than this. 

“Miss Johnson?” the voice called out again. 

Rey’s eyes narrowed. Here it comes, she thought. 

“What do you want?” Rey said, holding her finger in the page where she’d been reading, standing up and making herself visible to the owner of that now-familiar, hated voice. 

Mr. Solo was standing there in the doorway, hand still on the front door, looking like he was waiting for an invitation. It was still light outside, for the fading summertime, but she’d turned off the front lights when no customers had come in for two entire hours. The backlight from outside gave his long, wavy hair a glow like a halo, and cast his face in angular shadows. 

Rey tried not to notice how nice it made him look. It was just a face. 

“I was… I noticed that you have, um…” He took an uncertain step forward. “There’s a… you have a light, out back, that’s broken. I noticed it when I was out earlier. I didn’t know if you knew.”

“I have a few small repairs I know I need to do, yes,” Rey all but snapped back at him. She knew exactly which light he was referring to: The back porch light, which had been on the list to repair, along with a thousand other ones. “Please tell me it’s not bothering you  _ that _ much that you have to come over and tell me what I’m neglecting on my own home.”

He blinked at her, and, slowly, his curious expression transformed to one that was almost… hurt. 

“No. I wasn’t… I didn’t think that. I was just… if you wanted—”

“I don’t need your help,” Rey heard herself say. 

Angrily, she set the book down on the counter beside her, completely forgetting, in her frustration, that she hadn’t saved her spot. She looked down as he took another tentative step into the shop, letting the door close behind him. He was holding a box, with an outdoor light in it. 

And Rey hated the fact that her first impulse was to feel… appreciative. 

No. She would not be manipulated. Not even for oil-rubbed bronze Craftsman fixtures.

“Why did you buy a light for my house?” she asked. “Aren’t you planning on tearing it down anyway?”

He sighed. “If I told you that I found it in an upstairs closet in the other house, would you take it?” 

Rey closed her mouth, all fruitless fury dying on her lips. Of course. Finn or Poe must have bought the light for her, back before they’d left. They knew the kind of style she liked; they would’ve been kind and considerate, taken care of her like this. Offering help, not… foisting it upon her. Making her feel weak and powerless, like he did. That made so much more sense. 

A niggling thought tugged at her brain:  _ Why is it that you have no problems accepting charity from others, but just not him?  _

Wasn’t it obvious? He was trying to ruin her entire life. That was reason enough. 

“Fine,” she said. “You can just leave it on the counter.”

“I could go put it up for you,” he began, but quelled under Rey’s heated glare. “Fine, okay. Forget I offered.”

There it was: That tugging feeling again. Maybe it was just indigestion, but something made her soften. “No, I’d… if you want to, you can put it up.”

“I didn’t want to imply that you couldn’t,” he said hastily. “I mean, it’s obvious that you can…”

Despite herself, Rey felt a little warm under his flattery. He was still looking at her, still holding the massive box in one broad hand… Rey tore her gaze away from his hands, telling herself she’d only been looking at the style of the light fixture. Not the hands. Men had hands. Usually, two of them. Sometimes just the one. 

What was she saying? 

“No, it’s fine,” she said. “Why don’t you come through.”

He gave her a half-smile, and looked down at his boots. “I’ll come around back. My shoes are filthy.”

“Alright.” 

Then he nodded at her, and went back out the front door. 

As soon as the door shut again, Rey went up to the front, closing and locking the door, and flipping over the sign. There was mud on the floor here, but not too much. Maybe, she thought, he would soften her up by being nice to her. Try to throw her off-balance. As confident as she was working on electronics projects, there was always something just a little nerve-wracking about dealing with wiring in the house itself. Even with the power turned off. She wasn’t a huge fan of being electrocuted, just on principle. 

But if he wanted to do it? Again: The groceries would taste the same, wouldn’t they? And the light would be just as bright, even if he put it up. 

Even if the light shone only for the next few days, or however much longer she had here. 

Rey tried not to think too hard about the implications of this, and went out through the back door, onto the patio. 

Mr. Solo was already there. He was sitting, cross-legged, on the herringbone-patterned pavers, carefully unboxing the fixture and checking each part, each screw, against the carefully-unfolded instruction sheet. Rey had to laugh, softly, at his earnest perusal of the paper. 

“Have you actually done this before?”

He looked up at her, gaze a little amused. “Do you think I’d be doing it if I hadn’t? I don’t exactly want to electrocute myself just to prove a point.”

His wry tone made Rey smile, despite herself. Well, at least he was honest. “I turned the breaker off, so unfortunately, I won’t be getting rid of you that way.”

“Right,” he said, as if that genuinely hadn’t occurred to him. Then he looked around, to either side of him. “Where would you put the body, anyway, if you did?”

Rey laughed.

“I’m sure I could find a ditch.” 

At this, he actually smiled, revealing a mismatched grin that was actually pretty endearing. Rey found herself smiling back, before halting herself, and turning away. 

She fished the box knife out of her pocket, and set to work removing the caulking around the old fixture. “I really hope you’re not doing this because you’re one of those guys who thinks that girls are less technically capable than boys.”

At this, he laughed out loud.

“What?” Rey turned, looking down at him. 

Mr. Solo shook his head. “If you ever met my mother, you’d understand why that’s... hilarious.”

Rey didn’t want to pry. She certainly didn’t want to meet his mother, either. Despite all the questions tugging at her thoughts and demanding to be asked, she bit her tongue, and went back to the work at hand. The caulking was old and crumbly, and the fixture was rusted. Flakes of corroded metal came away on her hands as she worked. She was just short enough that reaching the very top of the fixture’s base plate was a tiny reach, but as Mr. Solo stood up behind her, he didn’t step forward or try to do it or take the knife from her hands. 

And she had to give him grudging respect for that. 

Rey turned around, and saw that he was just standing there, holding a screwdriver, watching her with attentive, guarded eyes. Wordlessly, he handed her the tool, and Rey carefully unscrewed the plate from the house. There was one more piece of caulk; she worked the edge of the blade beneath it, and then it came free. 

“She’s all yours,” Rey said, and she stepped back. 

Mr. Solo, so it happened, had actually done this before. Rey watched with grudging appreciation how quickly and efficiently he worked, taking the old fixture down, disconnecting the wires, cleaning up. She handed him the new one, and he twisted the connectors over the wires, matching them correctly before lifting the fixture up to the wall. 

Then Rey handed him back the screwdriver, and then, the fixture was up. 

“There’s, ah, a bulb, too,” he said, looking down at the box and frowning when he didn’t see it. “I left it inside; let me go get it.”

“Alright,” Rey said. She fiddled with the handle of the box knife, closing it securely and tucking it back in her pocket, watching as he crumpled up the plastic and instructions, and put it, with the old fixture, into the box of the new. 

Then, he offered it to her. “Did you want to keep this?”

Rey stilled. Of course, that was her job. She repaired things. It was oddly thoughtful, that he hadn’t just assumed she’d throw it out. Rey felt that strangeness again, low in her belly. Why should being offered a broken light fixture make her feel this... weird? 

She took the box. 

“I’m going to go get the light bulb,” he said. 

“Right.” 

And Rey watched him cross the lawn, heading over to his own house. 

She went inside, then, put the old fixture down on her work table. It really wasn’t that difficult of a job; she could’ve done it herself. Rey walked back, trying to convince herself that she’d had purely selfish motives for allowing all of this to happen. He was taller; he could reach the screws easier. This had to have a motive. This was all part of some plan. She had to believe in that, otherwise… 

Rey shook herself out of her introspection, and focused, instead, on trying to put her guards back up. 

When she came back out, Mr. Solo was just screwing in the bulb. Rey went in to turn on the breaker; when she did, no sparks exploded, which was a good sign. She flipped the switch for the porch light, just inside the doorway. A second later, a warm light illuminated her back yard. And him. 

He looked away from her. Still holding the box the light had come in, still holding the crumpled-up cellophane wrapping. Rey was suddenly aware of how tall he was, standing this close. She grappled for her comforting rage, welcoming it, letting it remind her of who he was, what he wanted. Even if his motives were inscrutable now, she knew full well what his intended goal was. 

To get rid of her. To break down everything she held dear. Even if he fixed one light, that didn’t change the fact that his goal was her obliteration. 

“Good night, then,” he said quietly, already heading back over to his side of the yard. 

“Good night,” she called back after him. 

He went inside, and Rey heard his porch door close. 

She hadn’t said thank you. The thought hit her out of the blue, and she turned around, looking at the fixture, as if the answer to why she wanted to follow him now, and say it, had just popped into her head. No. Of course she wasn’t going to do that. If Finn and Poe had bought the fixture, then it wasn’t really a thing she needed to thank him for, right? He was just… 

Just what?

Rey sighed. 

What was she doing? 

What was  _ he  _ doing? 

Rey took a step forward, heading back inside. It didn’t matter. Whatever games he was trying to play, whatever strategy he had, it wasn’t going to win. It couldn’t win. The stakes were just too high for her to slip, even for a minute. And if that meant that she had to harden her heart, well… it was worth it. 

Wasn’t it? 

No, Rey thought, as she turned off the lights and double-checked the locks on all the doors. It had to be worth it. Because the alternative was just too depressing to consider. 

She went upstairs, lay down in her bed and stared at the ceiling for a long time. But no matter how long she searched, both sleep and simplistic, reassuring answers eluded her. 


	4. Chapter 4

It was eleven-thirty in the morning, and Rey was working in the back, in the room which had once been the home’s dining room. A multitude of thoughts queued up her mind as she wrapped purchases in tissue paper and prepared them for shipping, each one clamoring for her attention, waiting their turn behind more urgent business. Packing and shipping. Worrying about tomorrow could wait until she got today sorted.

It was no wonder, though, that she felt out of sorts. Sleep had been elusive last night, her dreams nebulous and weird, blowing away like a dandelion in the wind the moment she’d opened her eyes.

That was probably for the best. Lately, the dreams she had remembered had been just as strange and… unsettling. It was probably better that she didn’t remember them, whatever they had been.

Now, though, she was focusing on work. Rey had survived this long by keeping her attention on what needed to be done. Mostly because if she stopped, and thought too far ahead, she’d want to lay down and never get back up.

One day, they were going to tear this house down. She knew it was true, and yet could not force herself to accept it. One day, she would be out on her own, looking for her next meal, saving and surviving.

She couldn’t think about that now. Didn’t want to plan for the depressingly inevitable.

Instead, she was arguing with her laptop. Everything she’d sent to print went into the aether, for all she knew. And she wanted to get the packages out today, and if she needed to buy another printer, or take them somewhere to print, she’d lose valuable time. Which meant a potential for a lost sale, a demand for a refund. She had to make this work.

Her printer had always ben a bit temperamental, but Rey was undaunted; she’d spent at least forty-five minutes uninstalling, then reinstalling, then checking the drivers, then reconnecting to the wifi, then sending the labels to the printer, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting—

Rey heard a tap on the glass in the back door. Startled, she stood up, and looked at the tall figure standing there, waiting patiently.

She opened the door.

“What are you—”

Without a word, Ben Solo pushed a stack of papers into her hands. “These aren’t mine.”

Rey blushed. “Oh.”

“I think you must’ve set it up to print to mine over wifi, instead of yours.” He quirked a smile at her. “Not sure how you manage that, but… Looks like business is booming, at least?”

“No.” Rey clutched the papers to her chest. “These are just the same twelve orders, I just kept… sending the job to the printer again and again…”

“Ah,” he said. And then, after an awkward little shuffle, he tucked his hands into the pockets of his dark jeans. He was wearing them with the same soft black sweater she’d seen him favor throughout the week, not that she’d been looking, or anything. The man didn’t seem to have a lot of variety in his wardrobe. “Well… anyway…”

“Thanks,” Rey said, and the word was surprisingly less bitter in her mouth than she’d guessed. She could still hear her own words, her own insults, ringing in her ears from the last time they’d spoken. “Sorry for wasting your paper, I can pay you back or…”

“Don’t mention it.”

He turned to leave, but on impulse, Rey called out to him: “Wait.”

Mr. Solo turned back and looked at her, his dark eyes curious behind his square glass frames. Rey, suddenly embarrassed, looked down at her stocking-clad feet, trying to find a way to compose the question without sounding like a complete jackass.

“Why are you being nice to me?”

He hesitated, shifting his weight from one long leg to the other, hands hanging to his sides. “What do you mean?”

“The groceries, the light, the… bringing this over,” Rey said. “You could’ve just thrown them away.”

“Do you _want_ me to throw them away?”

“No, that’s not what I meant.”

He adjusted his glasses, and considered her. “Then what do you mean?”

Rey sighed. “You want to take my home, and then you buy me groceries. You want to put me out of business, but then you send people to buy things I’ve made. I’m sure you’ve sent at least two more this week… I just don’t understand you.”

“I thought you knew everything you needed to know about me.”

Rey’s flush deepend; she couldn’t miss the wry, deadpan tone of his voice. “I… I mean—from my point of view, though, can you really blame me?”

Mr. Solo gave her a curious, searching look. It wasn’t critical, or cruel, though. Just like she was a puzzle, and he was trying to figure out how to fit all of the pieces into her shape.

“I’ll admit, Miss Johnson, I’ve had a hard time seeing anything from your point of view since this whole thing started. If I were you…” He let his words trail off, and shrugged. “I’m just trying to understand.”

“You might not ever understand it, then,” Rey said. And then, humoring him: “All of my life, I’ve had to make my own way. That’s not something I expect many people will understand. I’ve had to fight to get anything I’ve ever needed, let alone the things I wanted. This is more than just a home for me. More than just a business. It’s everything I’ve achieved. And if I let you take that away… there won’t be anything left of me at all. Money can’t buy that back.”

He blinked at her. “I don’t think that’s true. You’re clearly capable and inventive… You’ve done it before; you can do it again.”

“That’s the thing though, Mr. Solo,” Rey said, holding his gaze. “I shouldn’t have to.”

He stared at her, processing her words. Then he nodded, and went back across the yard to his house. Not his house, _the_ house. Whatever. It didn’t matter. Rey shut the door slowly, feeling the warmth of the stack of papers in her hands.

It wasn’t worth considering. Rey was sure it couldn’t mean anything more than a ruthless gesture, a way to weasel his way into her life and unpick every stitch she’d painstakingly sewn together. And she was barely holding it together as it was. The orders were good, better than they’d been, but it wasn’t enough, and she knew it.

Rey sat back down in her shipping room, and began folding the address labels and taping them down to their corresponding boxes. She double-checked them, added in the tracking information to their individual invoices, adjusted her own sales log, and finally got up, stretching her sore legs. A week of not doing yoga outside had been a necessary sacrifice, at the time, but she was tired of bending over backwards to avoid him.

Well, avoiding bending over backwards, since it was yoga. But the point still stood.

She brought the boxes out to the checkstand and went upstairs to grab her mat.

The sun was starting to go down when she finally rolled out her lime-green mat onto the patio stones. Someone’s dog had chewed it, it looked like, which was probably why they’d donated it, but one man’s chew toy was another woman’s chaturanga; Rey didn’t mind the corner damage.

He wasn’t outside, and whether or not he was watching, Rey didn’t have it in her to care. She stilled herself, starting with a familiar deep breathing sequence. Then on to sun salutations, feeling her tight muscles loosen up, giving herself the space to move freely. She was like water, like sunlight; she could flow anywhere, be anything. She wasn’t bound by this place, by his opinion of her—

Rey faltered, and then corrected her posture. He wasn’t invited to this. This was hers, and he wasn’t welcome.

Even then, the image of dark eyes and a sweetly tempting mouth haunted her, and there was nothing she could do to get him out of her head. He was cruel to her, and then his kindness made it harder to remember to hate him. And she hated that she’d realized that fact.

* * *

Ben Solo was, Rey decided, a problem.

Oh, he left her alone after that, staying inside through a sweltering-hot late-summer day that rapidly degraded into a thundering torrent of a rainstorm, and maybe Rey was too busy with the immediate needs of the leaks in her house to spend too much time caring about the why and wherefore—she had pots and pans to put under the ones she could find, and it wasn’t as bad as she had feared it would be—but still.

Why was it that his absence was just as troublesome to her as his presence?

Rey knew why.

She just… didn’t want to think too hard about the implications of it, was all.

So instead of… all of that that, Rey made herself a mug of tea, and sat on the faded green velvet settee down in the front parlor, looking out at the rain. This was a cozy spot, not entirely the best placement for selling either the couch or the things around it, but it had been left with the house, cleaned up relatively well and refinished by her own two hands. Someone would love this, and take it home with them.

Someone would, eventually.

But for now, it was here. And she was sitting in front of the wide front windows, looking out at the rain. Across the street, to the silver Kylo building, the view intercepted by the occasional car or truck or taxi.

Rey blew on her tea to cool it down. She breathed in the sharp, sweet, familiar-enough scent of the PG tips tea. Even though she’d spent around five years here in the states, it certainly hadn’t been enough time to mellow the British out of her. She still had strong opinions about the superiority of Cadbury chocolate, a weird, love-hate relationship with Halloween, and never got used to people who were fascinated by her accent. It was by turns adorable and exhausting.

But it was home, for now—inasmuch as anywhere was home for her. She owned property. She was grounded here. She had friends, neighbors—

Had. All but one of them was gone.

And the one that remained, he… he was… not likely to be concerned, at all, with this, or pretty much anything else. For reasons.

Rey sighed. Why did every train of thought circle back around to Solo Station?

She focused, instead, on the rain outside. There was a moving van that had pulled up out front of the Kylo across the street. Rey smirked a little at how unpleasant it would be to haul boxes and furniture in this weather, people-watching with a detached disinterest.

After a few moments of this, she got up, and pulled a book from the nearby bookshelf—some hardcover, floral-emblazoned text that she’d priced for sale—and opened up the front door.

The rain smelled sweet as it fell on her little patch of grass out front, and it pattered away on the roof of her porch with a happy sound. Rain was calming. Soothing and familiar, like the tea in her mug. It reminded her of cracking the window in one of the less-terrible foster homes, listening to the steady heartbeat of the clouds on the home’s tin roof. It always lulled her to sleep, and she even had found an app on her phone that replicated the noise, although there was nothing quite like the real thing. Because the real thing had a scent to it, a feeling, a heavy weight in the air, like a blanket of mist. It was alive, in a way that the sound alone was not.

Rey sat down on the bench out front, tucking her stocking-clad feet up under herself and tugging her oversized sweater down.

She set the book in her lap, half-heartedly looking down at the spine and not recognizing the title or the author. She opened it, finding chapter one, and scanned the first line hastily before looking back up at the moving van.

The rain was starting to clear now. Little by little—although it still was a mess.

And there was a family moving in, she could see now. Mother and father, in their seasonally-appropriate rain gear, laughing as they carried in boxes and directed the two drivers of the moving van. Unloading furniture. A bed, a headboard, a dresser. A smaller bed—which belonged, Rey assumed, to the little kid, who was running around, jacket flung open, tilting his head up to catch the rain on his mop of inky black curls. The mother tried in vain to get the jacket zipped back up on him, but the kid squirmed away, climbing atop the retaining wall, balancing, hooting with delight. The parents, distracted momentarily by questions from the movers, allowed their attention to be drawn away. Then the kid faltered, falling down into a pile of bushes. It was only a foot off the ground, but the father came over to him, helping him up, dusting him off. There were a few tears, perhaps, and then he was back to playing.

Rey swallowed back her own complicated emotions.

She’d never had a life like that. A family like that.

No parents to ruffle her hair and… kiss away her tears. Sure, she’d had plasters on her scraped knees and a bed to sleep in—always with worn sheets, scented with new soap or softener at each house and old with frequent washings, as if she was just the next in a long line of replacement children—and she’s had food. She’d survived; surviving was different from living.

And she couldn’t stop watching.

The little boy was cute. Out of nowhere Rey wondered what it would be like on the other side of the equation. Welcoming a child, and then turning around and sending them on their way. She’d never understood it. If she had a child, she’d—

Rey looked down at her mug, attempting to swallow back those melancholy feelings; instead, she only burned her tongue a little.

Motherhood wasn’t for her.

She wasn’t ready to be responsible for another human life, except smaller, more vulnerable, more fragile. She wasn’t at all prepared for that, and truth be told, could barely tend to herself, most days. But most importantly, Rey knew that she didn’t have the right sort of upbringing, the warmth and the gentleness, that she had always felt was a requirement for mothers to have.

Not that many of her own foster families had been warm and welcoming. But still. Perhaps seeing the contrast, having grown up the way she did, lived through what she’d seen, had cemented in Rey’s mind that if she ever wanted children, she would be the kind of person to either commit herself to them wholly and without reserve, or not at all. Because she had seen what it had been like, being shuffled around, loved for a little while and then cast aside.

It was impossible, unconscionable, for her to do the same to her own flesh and blood.

Rey took a drink of her tea; somehow it had gone from scalding to cold in the span of one rainstorm.

And the family across the street was just finishing up, by the looks of it.

Rey set her book down beside her, tucking her feet in closer. The rain was beginning to calm, slowing down to a little shower as the heavy, dark rain clouds blew away overhead. She watched, distracted, as a man came out of the front lobby of the Kylo building. He was tall and dark-haired, wearing a suit with a white dress shirt beneath it, the collar open a little to—

That was Mr. Solo, Rey realized.

How had she not recognized him? She felt foolish as she watched his long-legged stride, a little cold and shivery as she watched him greet the new family coming in… It was just that he looked so different, all nice dressed up in a suit. The rain caught on his hair as he came across the street, and he looked both ways before jogging a little to the opposite side.

Her side.

Instinctively, Rey picked the book back up. Opening it and staring down, studiously, at the first page of the first chapter again, as if it could somehow be her armor.

No luck.

“Mail came for you.”

Rey looked up at this, a little startled. “What?”

Mr. Solo was walking over to her front porch steps, a stack of mail under his arm, and another handful of pieces in his hands. Rey scowled a little, and glanced over at her mailbox.

“Why did you pick up my mail?” she asked. “Isn’t that a felony?”

Mr. Solo put his hands up in a gesture of defense, stopping at the foot of her stairs. “I didn’t get your mail. I… they’ve started delivering it across the street, and I went to go pick it up.”

“Oh.” Rey set aside her tea and her book, and stood up.

Mr. Solo took one step up onto the stairs, holding out the packet of mail to her as she approached. Rey took it, and flipped through it with only a portion of concern. It was nothing remarkable, mostly junk, but there were a few envelopes that looked like they were from the city, utilities, internet… she’d been intending to set them all on auto-pay, but it was yet another thing that had been at the bottom of a more ugent list.

“Thank you,” Rey said softly.

“Don’t mention it,” came his reply.

Rey felt the heat of his liquid eyes on her skin. Nobody could’ve faulted her if the man standing on her steps was more interesting than her bills and junk and pamphlets… and his liquid eyes were still watching her, and his hair was wet from the rain and it should’ve made him look… some way other than how he looked.

The suit, with its white dress shirt and open collar, hit on such a primal, shameful yearning inside of her, Rey gave herself over to the brief moment of pure, needy _want_ as he stood there before her; the ghosts of boyfriends past, the memory of the warmth retained in such a shirt when a man took it off. It would carry his smell, Rey thought distantly.

And there was no harm in looking, anyway.

Even if he was, well… evil.

Or at least, cornering her with… malicious intent.

Definitely working some kind of nefarious secret agenda. She was positive.

Rey swallowed, and looked back down at her mail. “Why are they delivering it across the street?”

Mr. Solo said nothing.

Rey’s eyes flicked up to catch his again, equal parts hopeful and fearful of the tentative warmth she would find there, but he was looking down at his own. She breathed a sigh of relief that did nothing at all to calm her nerves.  

It was just memory, Rey thought.

It didn’t mean anything.

And yet… her eyes were pulled back down to him, standing, as she was, a few steps above him.

“Hmm?” he said. “Oh, uh, probably just… y’know, a mix-up.”

“Right.” Rey nodded.

Then she watched as he reached into the pocket of his trousers and pulled out a little silver knife.

Instantly—and irrationally—her senses went on high alert. But, no, she calmed herself down, watched as he opened it and turned over the first letter in his own pile.

Of course.

She was just being… herself, again.

Rey sighed.

He was still standing there on the stairs up to her porch, neither on the ground nor quite inside her space. Rey worked her finger underneath the flap of the envelope in her hands, looking down, trying not to feel how near he was to her. How close—

“Shit,” he says.

And Rey looked up.

Mr. Solo was cradling his palm, half of his mail scattered on the ground, soaking in a puddle.

The knife must’ve skipped out of the envelope he’d been opening, Rey saw; there was red welling up on the surface of his palm.

“You okay?”

Mr. Solo huffed a bitter laugh. “Yeah. Just… slipped.”

Rey scoffed at this. “Then why do you use such a sharp knife?”

At this, he actually laughed. “That is an excellent question.”

“Hold on,” Rey said. “I’ve got a first aid kit inside.”

She turned away and went for the door before he could protest, or say anything at all. Inside, Rey set the mail down on the counter by her register, going back behind the glass-topped counter and crouching down to find the red zippered kit. It had seemed like a good, wholesome, adult type of practical choice, finding the first aid kit and keeping it there in case of an emergency. And as Rey was no stranger to burns from soldering, or cuts from metal or pokes from wiring, she had made use of it. She picked up the whole kit and went out front.

When she got there, Mr. Solo was still just standing there.

And it had begun to rain again, although not as fiercely as before.

“Come on up,” Rey said. “I’ll take care of you.”

He looked up at her. “I don’t want to impose—”

“Oh, just get up here,” Rey snapped back. “You’re bleeding all over my hydrangeas.”

The corner of his mouth quirked up. Slowly, he put one foot in front of the other, climbing up the stairs, onto her porch, and out of the rain.

“Thanks,” he said softly, when Rey nodded her head in the direction of the bench she’d been sitting on before.

He nudged the book and empty tea mug to the side with the toe of his shiny, expensive-looking dress shoes, and sat down. His right hand was still wrapped around his left, and Rey sat down opposite him, unzipping the kit and opening it wide between them. Finding the gauze, the bandages, the various ointments…

“Bad for business, I expect,” he said.

“What?” Rey was opening two of the wide, sterile gauze pads in preparation for removing his hand from the wound.

“The… leaving a puddle of blood on your front steps.”

Rey looked up at him. Then over to the steps.

“I didn’t,” he amended. “I was just… trying to make a joke.”

“Ha.” Rey replied. Although she did feel the tug at the corner of her own mouth. “No, I think the blood will go nicely with the dead body in the ditch.”

Mr. Solo laughed at this. And Rey felt her ire melt, just a little. She found a pair of gloves in the kit, and put them on. He was a stranger to her, she reasoned; there was no sense in actually getting his blood on her hands, even if he did have the blood of the entire neighborhood on his.

Metaphorically speaking.

“Alright,” she said. “Let’s see the damage, then.”

Gently, Rey reached for his hands, and drew them forward, resting them in her lap. It was just to make things easier, she thought. Anyone would do the same. A lifetime of tending to her own cuts and scrapes had made her incredibly resilient in the face of a little blood. Although she hoped that he wouldn’t need stitches…

Slowly, he uncurled his right hand from his left. There was a smear of blood on the palm, initially registering the injury as wider and much worse than it probably was. When she pressed down on the wound with the gauze, he winced, and flinched a little, but didn’t pull it back.

Rey cleaned it up, wadding up the soiled items, tucking them back in their packaging. Finally, she saw the wound: A short but deep gouge in the soft bit just below his index finger. It really did look like the knife had just skipped out of the seam of paper, then embedded itself into his skin. Its bleeding pretty steadily, but Rey thinks it should heal up just fine.

“It’s not too deep,” Rey said, patting it again with a clean gauze pad. “I can put a plaster on it, I think. Unless you want to go in for stitches…”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve had worse.”

Now that was an entire line of conversation for which they did not have the level of friendship to address; Rey carefully let that die, and instead, put the folded pad down.

“Hold this.”

He obeyed.

Rey took a few moments to get the paper bits off of the plaster, selecting one that was wide enough and sealed with sticky bits all around the sides so no blood would leak out. Hopefully. She readied the bandage, and he moved aside as she got it in place, and together, they got it settled on his skin, nice and flat an even. After that, it was just a question of using the alcohol pads to clean up the remaining mess on his palm.

“Can I have an extra one?” he asked her, when his hand was clean, and he was trying to get the pocket knife back out from where he’d hastily put it, in the jacket pocket of his suit. It was still open, and the tip had a stain of red on it.

Rey handed him a square of gauze, and he set about cleaning it.

“That’s an interesting knife,” Rey said, examining it with her usual scavenger’s eye as he moved it to clean. “Family heirloom?”

Mr. Solo winced a little as he flexed his hand, and shook his head. “Found it at an antiques store, actually. It reminded me of one my grandfather used to have.”

Rey gave him a look. “May I see it?”

“Sure.” He folded the cleaned blade in, and handed it over.

Rey took it.

It was an old silver pocket knife, Rey saw, turning it over in her hands, examining the fine detailing on the sides. There was a surprisingly delicate pattern in the etching: Birds and flowers and vines. She opened the blade, saw how sharp and well maintained it was, and how the etching extended to the base of the blade itself. Closing the blade, Rey turned it over once more in her hands, and then gave it back to him.

And Mr. Solo was just… watching her. His expression was unreadable as he tucked the blade back in his jacket pocket.

“What did your grandfather’s look like?” Rey asked. The question surprised them both; she could feel it in the tone of her voice, see it in the widening of his eyes.

Why did she care?

Rey cleared her throat a little, and looked back down at the still-open first aid kit.

“It was… silver, like this one,” Mr. Solo began. “A little bigger. Or maybe it always seemed bigger, in my hands, as a kid... But it had bits of black, a really deep mother-of-pearl inlay. And there was a ruby in it. But we lost it, at some point. When he was moved to a different memory-care facility, we think one of the workers there swiped it. Some jewelry had gone missing, too…”

Rey looked up at him, and he shrugged. His right hand was still curled around his left, the pad of his thumb pressing down on the center of the plaster.

“I never knew my grandfather,” Rey said softly. She folded the first aid kit up, slowly zipping it back together to contain all the supplies. “Any of my grandparents, actually. Maybe that’s why…”

“Why you like all these things you find,” he supplied, a hesitant, questioning tone to his voice.

Rey shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. Sometimes I find a… book, with a name in it. Or a photo album with someone’s ultrasound photos in it. Part of me wonders who this person might have been, to surrender something so personal. But then there’s always another side to the story, I suppose.”

Mr. Solo made a thoughtful sort of Mmm noise, and lowered his hand to his lap. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For the expert medical assistance,” he said.

Rey scoffed at this. “It’s just a plaster; I didn’t save your life, or anything.”

He smiled. But then, slowly, his face fell. “Miss Johnson… why won’t you accept my offer?”

Rey felt as if the wind had suddenly shifted direction. She felt cold, colder than she had any right to feel, out here next to his radiant warmth, sheltered by the rain. Sitting up a little straighter, she pulled her book and her kit closer to her chest, like armor, like he was threatening to take them from her—like he was threatening to take everything from her, book by book, brick by brick.

“I thought my answer was clear.”

At this, Mr. Solo let out an exasperated sigh. He lifted his left hand, and, forgetting it was injured, raked it back through his hair with a frustrated wince. “You’re intelligent. You’re—”

“And you’re forgetting yourself,” Rey stood up, knocking over her tea mug as she did so. “I refused you. I refused you three times, and you—”

“Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, Miss Johnson,” he continued, standing up as well, towering over her. “If that's not good enough for you, then... Name a better price.”

Rey took another step back. “No.”

“More? You want more from me?”

“I want nothing from you!” Rey all but yelled back, and it if the new neighbors or passing pedestrians in their raincoats stared at them for this, Rey didn’t give a shit. “I haven’t asked for _anything_ from you from the very start of this!”

“Then what do you want?”

“I want my friends back!” Rey exclaimed. “I want things to be the way they were!”

The book slipped in her hands, and she caught it just in time. Dimly, she heard the clatter of the mug at her feet, and both of them looked down.

Mr. Solo made a move, as if he was going to pick it up. Then he stopped, and straightened.

“I can’t do that,” he said. And they both knew he wasn’t just talking about picking up the mug.

He glanced to the side, looking at the towering Kylo building. Rey looked down at her feet, and saw that the tea bag had fallen out, and was staining into her shoes.

“I just want… I want you go go,” she said at last. “Please, just… go.”

So he went.

Without another word, and dressed in that lovely suit, and misted all over with the rain, and smelling of the faint copper tang of blood and the depths of cedar and whatever was in the soap he favored, and… and Rey hated, absolutely hated, that his departure felt like a loss as well.

It shouldn’t.

This was what she had asked for, right?

Rey sighed, and set the first aid kit, and the book, back down on the bench. She bent down, picking up the knocked-over mug and the cold, wet tea bag, plunking it back in and setting it beside the book. She looked out at the front yard.

This was what she had asked for.

This was what she wanted. It had to be. Otherwise—

Something white fluttered in the wind, caught in the hydrangea plant. The wind must’ve blown it off the porch, Rey thought. She rose, and went down into the light rain to collect it.

But when she pulled it out of the leaves, she frowned. It wasn’t a wrapper. It was… some kind of long ribbon of paper. Like a receipt. She stretched it out, curious. The text on it was faded a little, like it had been out there for more than a few moments. Must’ve… blown out of someone else’s garbage, Rey decided.

Then she read it. The name of the store and the address at the top. A home-improvement store.

And the items...

Rey felt anger settle in her breast like a blast of air into the heart of a forge’s fire.

One outdoor light fixture.

One package of lights.

The receipt was dated yesterday.

Poe and Finn hadn’t bought that light at all.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Be mindful of the tags, dear readers. This chapter is a pretty heavy one.

Tuesday came, and with it, the sinking realization that her new neighbor had been in residence for one full week. There was no getting rid of him, then, Rey thought, as she heated up the water in her kettle and listlessly put a teabag in the mug. Yesterday’s storm had washed away any blood that might have been spilled, and yet Rey knew that it had not washed away her resolve, nor her strange fascination and… attraction, to Mr. Solo.

Rey scoffed at this, resisting the urge to even give it a voice. Even though it was the truth.

She _was_ attracted to him—to the complex collection of features on his face, his prominent nose, his expressive mouth. She was attracted to the way he moved, the lean but strong lines of his tall body, so easily distracted by his voice and the way he used his hands. He had the look of every pampered rich kid, effortlessly wearing cashmere and 200-dollar chukkas, buying groceries, probably visiting the bulk bins for the first time in his life.

And yet.

It was undeniable, this feeling. There was something in him that pulled at her attention, whether she wanted it to or not. But that didn’t mean she would let it pull her completely off track. It wouldn’t be enough to make her purpose falter. Besides, all she had to do was keep thinking the worst about him— _being realistic_ , she mentally clarified—and things would quiet down. Her feelings would stop shouting, and go down to a manageable whisper.

She just had to remind herself of _why_ she was doing this.

Why _was_ she doing this again?

Rey didn’t know.

 _How can I be attracted to someone who I know I ought to hate?_ Rey wondered. _What in the world does that say about me and my taste in men?_

It had to be biology, she decided; nothing more and nothing less. Simple biology. He was a guy, a… handsome man, and in possession of all of his… requisite limbs and… necessary features. Rey, frowned, curling her toes in her socks, trying very hard not to think about the outline she’d seen when he’d been doing yoga.

It absolutely did not work in the slightest.

Yes.

He definitely was… in possession of certain necessary features. In abundance, if the outline could be believed. And—why was her kettle taking so long to heat up, when Rey’s cheeks felt like they were red-hot?

There wasn’t anything special about _him_ , though. Rey might’ve been attracted to anyone who had moved in, even if it hadn’t been a tall, handsome guy, with searching, dark eyes and a body like—

Anyway, there was a simple enough explanation for the feelings she was dealing with: It had simply been too long since she’d had sex; maybe her body was trying to wave that red flag in front of her face. A kind of warning. Go get something, anything—make it faceless, and meaningless, and quick, or I’ll punish you for this dry spell by making the most loathsome man in the universe smell good…

The light on her kettle blinked, the lever clicking as the induction element turned off; Rey could hear the water boiling inside it at last. She frowned, and picked it up by the handle, lifting it up off the base and pouring the water into her mug. The cord needed another piece of electrical tape, she noted, wary of the fraying metal wires beneath the worn-down plastic sheathing. It wasn’t worth throwing out, not quite yet.

Rey made a mental note to add the kettle to her long line of things to fix.

And anyway, he wasn’t _really_ the most loathsome man in the universe. Rey had to concede that point to the other guy, the ginger… Hux—or perhaps, whoever it was that the pair of them reported to. The one Hux had said wouldn’t be happy with Mr. Solo’s lack of progress. Maybe, just maybe, her anger towards Mr. Solo was misplaced.

Because he _had_ been kind to her. She couldn’t deny it. He’d been kind to her in ways that… could’ve been ignored with little trouble on his part. Just recycle those extra invoices, ignore her dropped groceries, leave her broken light alone…

The memory of finding the receipt for the light made Rey’s frown soften.

Poe and Finn… they hadn’t been the ones to buy the light for her. And she should be angrier about it, because… he’d lied. And there was no point to it, fixing a house he was just going to turn around and destroy.

_I knew you wouldn’t take charity from me…_

Damn him. Damn him and his kind eyes, and his hands, which gave in one and took from the other. Maybe her anger was misplaced, but he was still part of the machine. Approaching him made her feel like a rabbit being lured into a trap. If she stepped too close, if she took the bait, all would be lost. It didn’t matter what he wanted. This was her home. Her life. Everything she’d built with her own two hands. If she surrendered that, it would be tantamount to admitting that _she_ was disposable, too. And she couldn’t give in to that. Couldn’t let those old hurts grab hold of her once more.

Was she thinking about herself now, or the house?

And what were his true motives?

 _You could always just ask him,_ her thoughts taunted.

Rey took a granola bar from the near-empty box, and sat down on her bed. Seven-hundred and fifty _thousand_ dollars… If any of her friends were still here, they’d tell her to take it. She just knew they would. And they’d… they’d be right.

It wasn’t just about the money, though. It was the fact that, for once in her life, she’d been able to put down roots somewhere. Build a home, build a life, run a business, do things precisely the way she wished. With no foster family to come by and yank the rug out from under her. No foster family to take her in, eight years old and smiling, then send her back at eight and a half, when they discovered that their new puppy hated children. One of them had to go, and Rey… Rey was the one who was the more disposable. Noisier and more demanding. She’d learned a hard lesson that day, and she’d never forgotten it.

All her life, things had been taken away from her. And like a desperate child clinging to a broken toy, Rey clung so hard to her home now that she just knew her fingers would bleed from it.

It’s not about the house. It’s about refusing to let someone else dictate the course of her life. Refusing to let the First Order come in, raze this place to the ground, and erect another massive, ugly thing in its place. Making a stand; refusing to be forgotten, and wiped away, with no trace remaining.

Rey pulled over her laptop, and opened it, waiting for the dark screen to wake up so she could type in her username and password.

 _For seven-hundred and fifty thousand dollars_ , Rey thought, _you could just… buy another house, you know_.

_You could let go._

_You could make the choice, before the option isn’t there anymore. Before someone makes it for you._

Rey sighed. Maybe it was time.

But she wouldn’t think about it yet. Not yet. Not when there were new sales on her etsy page, two international orders that had come in last night. Not when she could go onto social media and see that Finn and Poe had posted their anniversary trip photos. They were in South America, somewhere tropical and lush and green, and she was, for a brief moment, hopelessly jealous at both their obvious affection as well as the drinks they were sipping through bright-colored straws out of entire carved pineapples.

Oh how she wished she could talk to them right now. Her cursor hovered over the messaging icon as she stared at the pictures, heartache and happiness mingling to a bittersweetness in her chest.

No. They were on vacation.

She would only be bothering them.

The news came up on the sidebar of her page, and she expanded the list, raising her mug of tea and blowing on it to cool it as she read. Tensions escalating… a possible breakthrough in gene therapy… look at what this cute pet ferret learned to do… a former senator was—

Wait. She knew that name.

Rey clicked on the link, and her eyes widened as she read the page.

 

 

> **Former Senator Leia Organa-Solo Champions New Sober Driving Initiative**
> 
> _Three years ago, former senator Leia Organa-Solo lost her husband, Han Solo, in a tragic motorcycle accident that also claimed four other lives. The cause: A single drunk driver, whose blood alcohol content had been over twice the legal limit. While the drunk driver escaped with minimal injuries, the friends and family members of the victims were left asking themselves why this senseless tragedy had happened, and what they could do to prevent it from ever happening again._
> 
> _Now, a new initiative, co-sponsored by five former senators, aims to do just that. Through a combination of education, prevention, and outreach, the initiative plans to offer alternatives to those who might choose to get behind the wheel after becoming intoxicated, as well as support for families who’ve also experienced the repercussions of these choices. Organa-Solo said of the initiative, “It’s time we all take a stand and become accountable for each other. With your help, we can stop these terrible accidents.”_
> 
> _Han Solo—who first came to the public’s attention as the charismatic and charming husband to what had, at the time, been the youngest female senator in the state’s history—always supported his wife’s career in public service. Their son, Ben, was often spotted alongside his parents in both his mother’s political events as well as his father’s races, as Solo began to make a name for himself on the professional motorcycle circuit. Organa-Solo and her husband were legally separated at the time of his death…_

 

Rey kept reading and rereading the last sentence as tears filled her eyes. For some reason, it seemed impossibly sad not only for him to have lost his father so suddenly, but to have the anniversary of it plastered all over the news. Like he couldn’t even grieve in private, but had to relive it. And she’d seen Hux come by the other day and talk with Mr. Solo—Ben—out front of the house; Rey had wondered, even then, how Ben had kept his cool with the way that guy was trying his best to be as pushy and intimidating as possible. Now that she knew how close it had been to what must be a deeply painful anniversary, Rey was even more struck at Ben’s restraint.

 _So he’s_ Ben _now, is he?_

Rey sighed, and wiped her eyes. The grainy family photo they’d chosen to accompany the article had a brown-haired, smiling man who had a roguish look about him, helping a dark-haired boy as they worked on a car engine. The former senator stood off to the side, a bemused look on her face. Ben looked to be nine, maybe ten years old then, and he hadn’t grown into his frame or features quite yet. His father had been handsome, in a rakish sort of way, and his mother was beautiful, elegant, and very petite. In the photo, Ben looked like a serious child. Rey couldn’t imagine the cruelty of growing up in the public eye, being compared, and found wanting, even before you knew or understood why.

Rey closed out of the tab. It was irrelevant, whether or not he was trying to ruin her life or be kind to her. She hadn’t figured out his game, but he was still a person, a human, who could hurt and feel grief like anyone else. And for Rey, who had all but forgotten her own parents’ faces, she wondered whether it was as tragic for her to have never had them at all, than to have had them, and lost one in such a fashion. Maybe it wasn’t worth even trying to compare. Maybe pain was just pain, and there was no relative scale.

If she’d been his friend, she would’ve sent him a message on a day like today. Asked him how he was doing, sympathizing and lending a listening ear. Of course she wasn’t his friend, and there was no way to send him a message, never mind that his business bio definitely had contained his email address and phone number. This wasn’t like bandaging his hand, and she _wasn’t_ his friend, and it would be better for her to remember that.

Still, though.

Rey got up, and got dressed, and went downstairs to open up the shop. She worked in the downstairs back room for a time, printing out (to the _correct_ printer this time) the customs forms for her two international orders, and doing some cleaning in her storage room.

She promised herself that she would think about it. The offer, the money… leaving this all behind. But there was something of a renewal in her, fueled by avoidance, that made her work harder, clean the shop, get things set up just the way she wanted downstairs…

Later, she promised herself. She’d think about it later.

Just after three, Rey realized she hadn’t had anything to eat, so she went upstairs and found a granola bar and ate a spoonful of the creamy peanut butter, right from the jar. Seeing the chunky jar on the counter beside the creamy reminded her of him all over again; of course he hadn’t been able to see what kind she liked, before it’d rolled into the street. Now that she had stopped seething, she had to admit that it was a thoughtful gesture, buying both kinds. Unless she could conjure up some sinister motives behind peanut butter, it probably had been kindly meant.

Belly a little less empty, Rey checked her orders again, and wasted another hour on the web downstairs at the counter, entertaining a grand total of three walk-in customers who browsed for less than a minute before finally calling it a night and closing up just after five.

It was late summer, but the sun was still warm on her face when she opened the back door and came outside. Across their narrow strip of shared, scraggly grass, Rey saw Ben sitting out there on his own patio, two bottles of wine beside him. One was empty, and the other, uncorked. Without looking at her, he picked up the bottle and poured a generous refill into the glass tumbler in his hand.

She could tell that he was aware of her. But Rey couldn’t determine whether she’d caught him or intruded or fallen into a trap. Was this the later she had been dreading? Maybe she should just go over there, and accept the offer. Try to make this as painless as possible. Cut ties, concede her losses, and toast to his success.

Rey watched as he raised the glass to his lips, and took a swallow, not savoring it, just drinking about half of it down like it was water. Then he set the glass back down beside him on the stones.

No. Now was not later enough.

This was something else.

“I’d offer you a drink,” he said, when he finally noticed she was watching, “but I’m not sure I’m stupid enough to trust you near me with something sharp.”

Rey stood still. She could hear the wine on his voice, a subtle-enough slurring of his words, overcompensated by a clipped, formal tone. It was paired with something that lay between self-pity and self-loathing. Rey didn’t move, just let the wind come up and cool her sweat-soaked scalp.

He was drunk; she was intruding.

“I… can go back inside, if you…”

He looked at her. “No. It’s your house, you can do what you want.”

“For now, anyway,” Rey said. She’d meant it almost as a joke, but Ben wasn’t laughing. There was no wry quirk of his lips, no amusement.

He was still watching her; he’d left his glasses inside, and without the thin barrier, there was heat and hunger in his gaze.

Something like a cord was pulling her towards him. Rey didn’t understand it. He was her enemy, her opponent—and yet she ached for the pain he must be feeling, seeing the raw, naked emotion on his face. He was all alone out there, and his grief was palpable.

Grief and... guilt.

Rey crossed the space between them, her bare feet padding silently over her own patio, then the dirt and grass, and finally reaching his little island. She hesitated, then sat down opposite him. He watched her slug back the last of the cold tea in her mug, and then she held it out for him, expectantly.

After a few seconds, he picked up the bottle, and filled her mug.

“Cheers,” Rey said, and took a drink. He lifted his own glass, expression unchanged, and tossed back the rest of the wine.

If he’d been her friend, she would’ve cautioned him to take it slowly. Maybe tried to make him laugh, somehow. Distract him.

But he wasn’t her friend. She was just sitting out here with him because he was—

What _was_ he to her, anyway? Somewhere in the balance between the attraction to him that she could no longer deny and the rage she could no longer sustain was a strange, nebulous middle ground. Uncharted territory; _here be monsters_.

Rey took another drink of the wine. It was good, so far as wine went: A big, full-bodied red, that warmed her down to her toes and made her tongue taste like berries, fruit and oak. Rey didn’t drink much, or often, but it was delicious. And there was something so… bougie, about a grown man getting drunk on good wine… She cradled the mug in her hands, and listened to the rush of wind and passing traffic.

If he wasn’t himself—if he was just some guy, sitting next to her at the bar, then she wouldn’t know his sad story. She wouldn’t know the significance of the day today, for him. Or be threatened by him, ready to concede her selfish and headstrong fight. He’d just be a guy, and she’d just be a girl.

That was closer to the landscape that Rey understood. Not this… whatever this was.

The urge to break the silence between them was almost unbearable, so Rey gave up, and gave in.

“I’m so sorry,” she said softly, looking down at his still-bandaged hand, remembering how warm it had felt in her own, how tender, how strong, how vulnerable. “I… about your dad. There was an article on the news, and I… I just wanted to say that I was sorry for your loss.”

He didn’t reply. Just stared down into his glass as if the right words were at the bottom, somewhere.

“I never really knew my parents at all, so I can’t imagine losing one like that… And if you wanted to talk about it… ” Rey watched him. She couldn’t assess whether she’d said the right thing, or offended him, or anything at all. He seemed numb, like something carved of marble. For a moment, she considered thanking him for the wine and leaving him to his solitude.

Then, out of nowhere, he laughed. It was a bark of a laugh, bitter.

“What’s funny?”

Ben shook his head. “You know, it takes me a year to talk myself into believing my own bullshit, and then every year, it all comes back to me. It’s like I’m stuck in one of those hamster wheels, you run and you run and you run, and you don’t fucking get anywhere at all.”

Rey chose her next words carefully, not fully understanding. “Grief can—”

“It isn’t grief. I wish it were.”

“What do you mean?”

He took another drink. “He loved my mom, but the two of them drove each other crazy. Only stayed together when she was in office, or running for office, or doing speeches in support of someone who was running for office… so, they couldn’t really live apart and still sell the whole ‘one big happy family’ illusion to the voters. Divorce didn’t sell. Although they and I knew they never should’ve gotten married in the first place.”

“They tell you all this?” Rey asked.

He shook his head. “Not in so many words, no. But… I was a kid, I heard everything. I knew how they felt about each other. Neither of them were particularly subtle. As soon as he could get out and get away from us, he did.”

Rey’s heart sunk at the word he’d chosen. _Us._ She knew a little of what that felt like, having someone walk away from her, feeling like she wasn’t good enough to make them stay. That stung. She took another drink of her wine. What he was describing certainly didn’t mesh with her imagined picture of his happy, privileged upbringing. She felt a little guilty for having presumed so much.  

“He got back into racing. Mom was glad; he finally had a hobby that wasn’t annoying her.” Ben took another drink from the glass, and refilled it from the bottle, nearly emptying it. “But they’d meet up sometimes at a hotel. I don’t know why I’m even telling you this.”

“You don’t have to, it’s personal, I didn’t mean to pry—”

“And I’d always know. Like, who needs to know that much about their parents’ sex lives? Fuck.” Ben took another drink.

Rey, who’d had peanut butter and not much else, was already starting to feel a little buzzed. She was watching him, trying to decide just how drunk he was; He was a big guy, maybe six-three, and solidly built, but he’d finished off nearly two entire bottles of wine. And he might have even had more before he’d come outside, she had no way of telling. Although she heartily suspected he had.

The alcohol seemed to loosen his tongue considerably. This was more, so much more, than she sensed he actually wanted to be revealing. It was like watching a wrenching performance on stage, being unable to look away. Like being party to some horrible catharsis, one that reached down and twisted and plugged right in to her deepest grief and insecurities, too.

She understood him.

There were things that she wished she could get out, too. Locked away, deep inside of her, aching in equal measures to be contained and released.

“I think I scared them...” he swallowed back his next words, cleared his throat and reconsidered. “ They didn’t know what to do with me. They talked about sending me to military school. I even thought I’d do whatever to get away from them…”

His voice trailed off, and he looked up at her, as if realizing that she was there, and he’d been filling up the air between them with his half-spoken secrets. He blushed, ever so slightly, and Rey lifted her mug to her lips and drank the rest of it just to keep herself from saying something stupid. She should go. She was intruding, but she just couldn’t leave him like this. Didn’t want to leave him. Because there was so much more he wasn’t saying, and if her snap judgements were correct, it was potentially a more deep and painful wound than the things he already had confessed.

Ben shook his head. “I’m sorry, _Fuck_. I didn’t mean to spill all my shit all over you, too.”

Rey set her mug down on the stones, and shook her head. “No, it’s alright. If talking helps...”

God, he looked like he needed a hug. Rey was at a loss as to what to do. There was still a space between them, and it was thickened, made of something more dense than air. She resisted the urge to embrace him.

There was more he needed to get out. Rey felt it between them, the pain of something sharp, working its way out of the skin.

“I was with him, the night he died,” Ben said calmly. “I went to go see him, and he was working on his bike, and we had a fight. I was bringing up old dirt between us, trying to… rile him up. Trying to provoke a reaction. And it worked. He got on the bike to leave and I just knew... “

“Ben—”

“I told him he was a fucking useless father, and I wished he’d just die.”

“Ben, no—”

“It was my fault,” he pushed onward. “It was. I knew what I was doing. I knew the bike wasn’t safe, and I knew he’d do it. I _wanted_ him to get hurt. I wanted to… make him see me. See _me_ . Not the kid in the photos, not their mistake, not the… the kid who’d almost derailed his mom’s career or ruined his dad’s freewheeling life. He never saw _me_. And then after that, I never saw him. I got exactly what I wanted.”

Rey reached over beside him, and took the bottle. Partially, it was just to get it out of his reach, and for the rest of it… she needed the wine, needed that heady buzz filling her ears, that warmth filling her body. She filled her glass under the his curious gaze, and when she looked in his eyes she saw that his lashes were wet and spiky.

He was crying.

“Ben,” Rey said softly, reaching out her hand to touch his. “I’m sorry.”

He looked down at where their hands touched, then up, into her eyes. He didn’t move his hand away. Just kept it there, trembling just a little under her touch.

“I killed him, Rey. I might as well have been the one to push him into traffic. They might have pinned the accident on the drunk driver, but I know it was Han who’s bike lost control. I don’t care what the report said, I saw the photos; I was there. And every year I think, maybe I can drink enough to forget that I was responsible. Every year, I fail.”

Slowly, Rey took the drink from her mug, downing it all. Then she set it down. There was no way to tell whether he was telling the truth, or just his own perspective. She supposed that it didn’t really matter. _We’re always our worst punishment_ , Rey thought. _Memory is our cruelest jailer._

“Ben… have you ever told anyone this? What happened that night? These feelings, these fears?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“So why are you telling me?”

“Honestly? I have no idea.” He was staring into her eyes, looking at her as if he’d just realized she was there, a real person, not just a figment of his imagination. Not just his confessor, who’d come to absolve him of his guilt.

And, Rey decided, he was drunk. Very drunk. Somewhere out beyond drunk, into that soft, fuzzy, lovely place, where words spill out and emotions run hot and sharp and unfiltered. Like a boat slipped from its mooring, cast out to sea. The man was floating in it.

“I think you do know,” Rey said gently, shifting under the weight of his gaze.

His mouth curled into a lazy smile, eyes never leaving hers. “Maybe I just like the way my name sounds in your mouth.”

Rey felt a dark shiver trail down her spine at the sound of the unguarded emotion in his voice; the wine was making him bold and foolish. She wondered how much of this he’d had to drink inside, and what else besides. His mouth was wine-stained and lush, and his tear-filled eyes were gazing at her like he hadn’t just bared his most intimate, shameful secrets. Suddenly Rey understood why Little Red had been so very drawn to the wolf in the woods. Why she’d strayed off the safe path, and gone with him into the darkness.

The light was fading around them, the evening growing cool now that the sun had gone down. But she felt hot, feverish, her body responding despite all of her senses telling her to run.

What was happening to her? How had she allowed herself to get pulled into this man’s orbit so quickly? Why did she no longer flinch at the thought of him being in hers?

Slowly, she drew her gaze down his face, focusing, for a second, on his mouth. Then she looked into his eyes, drawing a steady calmness around her like a cloak. “I think you do know why you’re telling me this.”

“You do?” he said, his low-lidded gaze soft and almost sultry, the words wet in his wine-drunk mouth “Ah, you do.”

“Maybe you think if… if you tell the truth to someone who already hates you, they’ll give you the judgement you think you deserve. So you don’t have to do it to yourself.”

He blinked at her, and the heat of his gaze faltered. “What?”

“I’m not giving you that. It’s not my job to forgive you, or hate you.” Rey stood up. “Not about this, anyway. I’m very sorry for your loss, and I can’t imagine what you’ve gone through, but I wasn’t there that night. I don’t know what happened. Even you don’t know what truly happened. So it’s your choice.”

“My choice?” He stood up as well, wavering a little unsteadily on his feet, his shirt half-tucked in. “You think this is something I _choose_ to endure?”

“No, I mean… the only person who can forgive yourself is you.” Rey floundered, finding it difficult to say what she meant in the kindest way possible, to a man who was, for all that she thought she knew him, a stranger. “Have you talked to someone, someone with a proper... degree? Training? A counselor, someone, anyone?”

He shook his head, gaze downcast. “Not in years. Not since… No, if I go in, I’ll just start talking and I won’t be able to stop. And I can’t—I’ve already said too much. You can see what I’m like.”

His hand had crept to his chest, clawing at his heart, as if he could contain himself, shove all the words back in. Color was high in his cheeks, and Rey could see his pupils were dilated. All at once, he looked very young.

Young, and desperate, and terrified.

“I made it a whole year,” he said softly, with a laugh that was halfway to crying. “Three hundred and sixty four fucking days.”

Rey understood, then. He wasn’t the first person she’d met who’d struggled with sobriety, with addictions, with a variety of demons and tormentors. This wasn’t something that one evening could fix, or one confession could wash away. There were wounds here, wounds as deep as her own. And maybe she’d heard the advice enough that she knew how to give it. Even if she didn’t know how to follow it.

“I can see that you’re hurting,” Rey said, gently. “I can see that you… you think what you’re doing is right. Not just with this, but with everything. Hell, I came out here to tell you… it doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you tomorrow, when you’re sober.”

“Fuck,” Ben said, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes.

“Ben, this won’t help,” Rey said. “I… what you’re doing to yourself… it’s tearing you apart.”

He shook his head. “I can’t. I can’t talk to anyone. I can’t.”

There was nothing else that Rey could say. On impulse—or maybe it was the wine, and the darkness, and the strange pull that lured her into the warmth of his body—Rey rose up on her toes, and pressed a quick kiss to his cheek. _I like the taste of your name in my mouth, too,_ she thought, feeling her lips connect with his warm skin, feeling the faint rasp of stubble there before drawing away.

His hand caught on her waist, though, stilling her retreat. Rey could’ve struggled, could’ve easily broken out of his soft grasp, but she was caught in his eyes, too, and they were so much stronger than his hands.

“Rey,” he said.

She was going to kiss him again, if she stayed here. His eyes were focused on her mouth, and his teeth worried at his full bottom lip, tongue darting out to chase the pain, like he could taste her there already.

_No._

_I can’t do this._

She took a careful step back from him, and Ben let his hand fall back down to his side. Then, before she could doubt herself, she ran back inside, to the comfort and safety of her own home, and the quiet cacophony of her own thoughts.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for sticking with this mess, dear readers! I've been pulled off-task and am happy to be back with more of our dysfunctional pair.

Once, when Rey had been small, she’d found a bird that had fallen from its nest, high up in the maple tree in the backyard of one of the houses she’d briefly called home.

She’d taken the bird in her cupped hands, held it carefully as the poor thing had struggled and flapped weakly, trying to fly. It had been beautiful—beautiful and broken, and Rey had tucked it into the pocket of her sweatshirt, and climbed up into the tree, searching for the nest, trying to replace it. When she’d found it, perched on the edge of a limb no wider than her own wrist, she’d carefully deposited the bird back inside the circle of twigs and matted feathers. It had tweeted at her, and Rey had hoped, at the time, that it understood.

The metaphor now was a little too on the nose. But the feeling inside was the same.

Ben Solo was not her broken bird.

Because she’d found the little thing on the ground again the next day, and this time, there had been no point in returning it.

Rey’s stomach clenched into knots as she sat up on her bed, hugging her knees to her chest, thinking. All of what she’d assumed about Ben Solo was wrong. Or, if not outright wrong, wildly off the mark. That snap judgement she’d always trusted. Oh how wrong she had been.

His eyes still haunted her. The look in them, the way his mouth had moved. Pain had radiated around him like incense in that had been burning in a cathedral, long before her arrival.

And this, this feeling right here? This was exactly why she’d switched to fixing inanimate objects, instead of trying to do the same with people. Circuits could be understood. Wiring could be repaired. People weren’t hers to fix. There was no magic potion, no sensitively-worded answer that she could give him, to make everything in his head go away.

Like the rest of the however-billion lost souls on this hunk of space rock, Ben Solo had to figure his own way out.

But that didn’t mean he had to be alone when he did it.

Rey rubbed at her temples, wondering what he was doing right now. Was he laying on that mattress on the floor, passed-out and already sleeping it off? Or was he still drinking? She could feel that instinct urging her to get up, to go to him, to see if he was alright. And that, too, was just… something she would’ve done for anyone, right? Something, at the very least, she would’ve want done for her.

Rey didn’t move.

If she went to him right now, she knew that things wouldn’t stop at a kiss. And that wasn’t what she wanted, or what she needed, from him or from anybody.

She had to focus. Get back to her purpose. She’d practically mailed herself to him in a box, the way she’d thrown herself at him. And he’d been drunk, and grieving, and he was trying to take her home away from her—

_He’s trying to_ **_pay_ ** _me for it._

_But it isn’t my job to help him. Fix him._

_Is it so wrong to be a decent person, though? Is it wrong to have compassion?_

Rey sighed, and put her face in her hands. How in the world had she gone from hating him to kissing him in a single week? Rey desperately wanted to blame it on the wine, or a lapse of judgement of some kind, but it wasn’t quite so easy.

Had she taken advantage of him, in the state he’d been in? Or had she been taken advantage of, lured in by his emotions, his pain? Was he just another broken thing that she could fix, if she just put her hands on him and tried hard enough? Rey felt herself grow hot at the implications of that thought; she’d been thinking more in the emotional sense, but as soon as the idea of putting her hands on him had arrived in her brain, a whole swirl of accompanying images had leapt into movement.

Rey got up from the bed, and practically ran to the bathroom. There, she flicked on the light, wincing at its brightness, turning on the sink and splashing cold water on her face. What the hell was wrong with her? _A man buys you groceries once and tells you his sad backstory and you want to go all ‘grinding emo’ on him all of a sudden? What is wrong with you?_

She stared at herself in the mirror. Trouble was, she wasn’t heartless. She’d felt his anguish, his grief—even if he hadn’t wanted to name it as such, she could read it, plain as day. What did motives matter, when someone was hurting?

Wasn’t it at all possible that simple, human connection could take priority, if only for a moment, over petty concerns—

_Keeping your home isn’t petty._

_It is, if you refuse to see that there are greater possibilities than the ones you—_

_I don’t want to feel for him, I don’t want to feel anything at all for him!_

_But I do._

“Fuck,” Rey said, softly, to her own reflection. “Just _stop_.”

Slowly, she took a breath.

Then she turned, and looked back at her room. The wine had made her fuzzy, and once again she cursed her low tolerance for the stuff. Already she felt her cheeks burning hot from vicarious shame, the way he had bared himself to her in a way that she just knew he’d regret in the morning. And then, chasing on the heels of that thought, a wonder why she cared how he’d feel at all, on the next morning, or any morning.

She didn’t care. She doesn’t. She _won’t_.

It was late, and the light outside had faded. Rey pulled the elastic from her hair and raked her nails across her scalp.

_Later_ , she thought. _I’ll think about it later._

She went to her bed, and lay down on top of the quilts. It was warm, but she shivered, memories stirred up in the dark eddy of her thoughts.

Missing her parents. Then being angry at her parents. And then forgetting her parents.

Making notches in the wooden windowsill, counting the number of days at the first foster home. She would count them every night before bed, reassure her that she surely wouldn’t reach the end of the window before her parents came back to get her.

Then being discovered, punished for the damage she had done. She’d only been five, and didn’t remember much of that first home, but she remembered the punishment.  

Rey rolled to her side, and curled up on herself, drawing her knees to her chest.

The memories slipped through her fingers as she attempted to hold them steady. One home, then another, then another. Faces smearing together, some cruel, some kind. She hardly recalled them all. Only that she had lost count of the days. Lost them, until they had stretched into years.

Her family had not come for her.

Maybe they would never come. Maybe they weren’t even looking.

Rey shivered once more, and felt tears slide down her face, sideways, into the quilt.

She was alone. Broken and useless. Thrown out, like yesterday’s trash. There would never be kind hands to come and pick her up. There would never be anyone else’s hands, save her own.

No. She was a grown-up. She wouldn’t cry.

“Fuck,” Rey said, softly, to the encroaching darkness.

This was exactly why she didn’t drink.

Rey closed her eyes. And then, what felt like seconds later, awoke to the sound of her buzzer and the smell of sparking electronics.

It was morning.

Rey jumped up, nearly falling off the bed. She blinked in confusion at the strange noise and the smell...

“Shit!”

Rey heard the buzzer give another futile chirp, and her eyes locked on the cloud of light gray smoke curling up from the broken buzzer. Someone was downstairs… someone was at the front door, and the short-circuit had finally given up the ghost.

“I’ll be right down!” Rey called out, uselessly, because there was no way anyone at the front door could hear her.

She lunged for the buzzer, taking a few hasty steps to close the distance between her bed and her workspace, and then leaning across her desk to pull at the device. With a muted electronic noise, it came away from the wall, bare wires exposed. And underneath them, a dark smear of singed wood.

Rey cursed again. Then she set the buzzer down on her desk at her soldering station, putting her feet into her boots and practically running down the stairs.

When she reached the lower landing, she felt her heart do the faint swoop at the black-clad, dark-haired silhouette standing outside her door. But then, as she approached, she realized that it wasn’t Ben… it wasn’t Mr. Solo at all.

She opened the door.

“Hi, how can I help you?”

“Hi, Mrs… Johnson?” The man replied with a smile. He was a youngish guy, dressed in a suit that looked nothing near so nice as the ones Mr. Solo preferred. The man had dark hair, neatly-combed, and had an eager, almost apologetic demeanor about him.

“It’s Miss, actually.”

“Oh, right, my apologies.” The man glanced down at his clipboard, keeping it angled away so Rey couldn’t see what was on it. “I’m so sorry to disturb you, but I’ve got a crew out front that’s going to be making some improvements to the street drain, and I just wanted to notify you that there might be some interruptions in the water service.”

“Oh,” Rey said. She scrubbed a hand through her hair, realizing as the man was talking that she’d slept in her clothes, and probably looked as wretchedly hungover as she felt.

“I’d like to come onto your property and take a water meter reading, so that if there’s any problems later, the city can credit you back the portion of unusable water, if the service interruption continues past the expected time range.”

“That’s fine, sure.” Rey said. “I don’t… I think it’s around the side of the house? It might be out back… but you can just go ahead.”

He gave her a smile. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

“What did you say your name was, again?” Rey blushed. “I just… if you have a business card or something, so I can get ahold of you if there’s any problems?”

“Ah, yes.” The man stopped, and patted himself down, searching the pockets of his suit coat. “You know what, I’m out of cards, would you believe that?” But I’ll make sure one of our guys comes and gets the info to you, alright?”

“Sure,” Rey said. She smiled back at him, and he went back down the steps, heading around the side of the house.

Rey stood in the front doorway a little longer, something pinging in the back of her sluggish brain that there was something important she’d forgotten… his name, he hadn’t said what it was. But there was a crew out front, and two workers in orange safety vests were setting out cones to block the street, while another three were taking off the grate covering the storm drain. It probably was nothing to worry about.

She was too hungover to care, anyway.

* * *

Before the water could get properly disgusting, Rey went up and filled her kettle, and then filled another cookpot with the clean water just in case she wanted to wash up later. Who knew how long it would be out.

Rey waited for the water to heat up, and then made herself some tea and grabbed another granola bar. She sat on her bed and ate, making a mental note on an already strained mind (thanks, alcohol) that it was time to take her linens up to the laundromat again. Then she jumped, as outside, something clanged ominously. The sound reverberated through her skull, and Rey sighed, and put her hand to her forehead.

It was always something.

Slowly, she finished her breakfast, forcing the last bits of the granola bar down, and making a second cup of tea with the same bag. How long had it been since she’d last had a drink, to make the wine affect her so much? She really had become a lightweight.

Then, she stilled, and looked out through her lace curtains. If she felt this wretched, how did her neighbor feel?

_What does it matter to you? He’s a big boy; he can drink if he wants, and suffer the consequences of it, too._

Rey resolutely decided she wasn’t going to worry about him, or his quite probable hangover.

She sat down at her desk, and picked apart the broken buzzer. She frowned at the continued metal clanging outside, and stared at the burnt patch of exposed two-by-four where the unit had been mounted. For a short time, she tried blocking out the noise with her headphones, but the music was too loud, and it made her headache worse, so she turned the music off and just left the earbuds in as really terrible ear plugs. After a time, she got up, and stretched, and went in to wash up for the day and change clothes, turning on the tap and then frowning as the flow gave way to a sputter of brown, rusty water. Good thing she’d saved some clean water.

Rey stripped, and threw last night’s clothing in the basket. Wetting a washcloth, she wiped herself down, starting with her face and arms, then everywhere else. It was cold, and the cloth was rough against her skin, and if she scrubbed at it a little too hard, well, it was good to be clean, that’s all. Her skin reddened from the friction, and, when she finally felt a little less awful, she threw the damp towel in the basket as well. The cold air of her room dried her off, and up here, there really wasn’t anyone here to see her as she walked over to her dresser. The window above her desk was far enough away, and she doubted anyone in the Kylo building across the street had timed their peeking directly in to see her.

She pulled out a pair of clean underwear from her dresser and put them on. There was something intrinsically ridiculous about feeling rebellious wearing Tuesday pants on a Friday, and Rey laughed softly at herself. _You’re absolutely wild, you rebel you…_ Then, as she was pulling on a bralette, Rey realized that it wasn’t impossible that her new neighbor could be looking in on her. She adjusted the worn lacy garment across her ribcage, and walked over to the window over her bed. Slowly, she sat down on the bed, her fingers gently pulling at the lace curtain, drawing it aside.

Was she really hoping he’d be watching her? Did she really imagine what it would feel like, to have his dark eyes trace the contours of her body… Rey shivered, and looked out across the gap between her house and the next. There was nobody in the window.

She let the curtain drop, and stood back up, feeling foolish and angry with herself. As if she’d wanted to have him creeping on her. Of course she hadn’t. What had she even been thinking?

Standing there, in the middle of her room, in her underwear, Rey took a good, long look around.

This was it. The sum total of her life, everything she’d built. And it wasn’t going to be enough. Not because she’d suddenly found it to be worthless, but because the sudden weight of all of her obligations was hanging like a sword above her head. If she managed to scratch out enough for this week, then what about next week? And the week after that? How much leaner could she get, giving herself to this life?

Catching sight of herself in the bathroom mirror, Rey stared back. She could see only down to her knees, standing this far back from her reflection, but it was enough. Shifting under her own cold scrutiny, Rey felt just as ragged as her house looked: bony and thin, like a stone worn down to a pebble. Granted, she’d never been anything but slim and relatively underfed all of her life, but it shocked her to see it so clearly. It was as if she’d been going through the motions for the last few months, or maybe even years, working and not seeing. Trying to keep everything going forward, including herself, without even realizing it had already begun to grind to a halt.

Suddenly, she felt tired. As if she’d aged a thousand years in the space of one breath. She was twenty-two years old, but felt like she was one hundred and twenty-two. Like she was at the end of her own life, looking back and picking through the junk, trying to find her own memories.

_This is why I don’t drink,_ Rey thought, turning away from her reflection and going back over to her dresser.

She pulled on an oversized, worn sweater and a pair of leggings, and sat back down on her bed, not feeling up to opening the shop downstairs, so long as the street was closed. And if there was a twinge of guilt at how swiftly she accept this excuse, Rey refused to acknowledge it.

* * *

The buzzer was, to borrow a highly technical phrase, completely fucked.

Rey set the thing down on the desk and let out a soft growl of frustration. Not only had the unit been fried, but the fire had spread further down along the wiring itself, between the floors, at least as far as she could see. She’d found a torch, cleared off a space on the desk and pulled herself up on top of it, looking down, trying to assess the damage.

She’d have to pull out the desk… no, first she’d have to clean off the desk, and sort the parts and projects she had in pieces around the top of it, and then she’d be able to pull the desk away from the wall and get into the wallboards. Rey sighed, and stretched, arching her back over the chair and feeling her spine crack in a deeply satisfying way.

Maybe she’d have to pull the wallboard downstairs, by the door. She’d definitely have to take the cover off the junction box down there to get a new wire pulled.

The shop was closed anyway; Rey dug out the spool of wire from under her desk, found the screwdriver and wire cutter she needed, and went down the stairs.

Catching sight of the orange-vested workers out front, Rey frowned.

Were they tearing up the whole street? How long, exactly, was her water going to be out? She made a mental note to plan to head up the street and grab some gallons of water. Thinking about groceries made her think about _him_ , though. The kind way he’d helped her, the way he’d made it up to her, the way his dark eyes had seen her when he’d bared his vulnerable soul to her critical gaze. Thoughts of him were the color which had been shading the edges of her thoughts all day… and she couldn’t help but wonder if Mr. Solo… if Ben needed water as well.

As if on cue, someone knocked on the door.

There was a tall, dark silhouette standing on the other side of the glass. His face was obscured by the Closed sign, but Rey knew who it was, this time. She went closer, feeling a prickle of awareness, the sensation of some great, cosmic Tetris piece, sliding into place.

It was Ben.

Rey hesitated, then unlatched the door, opening it and letting it swing wide. He didn’t come in.

“Hi,” she said cautiously.

“Hey,” Ben replied. He lifted up the tied white plastic bags in his hands. “I bring a peace offering. And an apology.”

Rey couldn’t deduce anything about his mood or intentions from behind the dark shades he wore… although, if she had to guess, the sallowness of his face and the way he flinched when the jackhammers resumed their assault on the road made her suspect that he was feeling the effects of his overindulgence.

She looked down at the takeout bags.

Immediately, Rey’s stomach growled. Loudly. She nodded, and stepped to the side, waving him in. She absolutely did not look at his ass as he walked by, settling for closing the door behind him, one last look at the workers outside in the sun.

“You have a table?” he asked, looking around her shop hesitantly, still keeping his shades on.

“Yeah,” Rey nodded, before hastily amending, “I mean, I have one, upstairs. But I don’t think you should really…”

Her voice trailed off.

And he was still watching her, his gaze inscrutable from behind his sleek black aviators.

“We can eat down here. Come on back, I can make something work,” Rey finished. She gestured for him to follow, walking through the rows of her accumulated treasures and leading him to the workroom in the back.

She could only imagine what it must look like to him, this place, these things. It must look like so much trash, her rows of vintage clocks and stacks of melamine plates from the 70s, oil lamps lovingly polished and repaired were nothing compared to a fancy LED flashlight at your side, Rey supposed. He wanted to buy her out; nothing here could be of value to him.

And yet, he was here. It felt weird how not-weird he felt, sharing this space with her.

Rey led him back to what had once been the dining room, and now served as her workspace, and resolved not to try and make sense of her confusing array of thoughts. Not until she’d eaten, anyway.

Her work table in the back room was an old dining table, but there was only one chair, and it didn’t match. Hell, it didn’t even look like it could support the tall length of him, but it was better than sitting on nothing. And he was, after all, a guest in her home.

Honestly, what was she doing?

Rey gestured to the table, and pushed most of her packing materials, rolls of tape, and boxes down to the far end, clearing a space for him to set down the food.

“Just here is fine,” she said, all full of nervous energy. He was too tall, too big; he took up too much space in what had once felt like a cavernous room.

“Thanks,” he said. “Rey, I wanted to apologize, for last night.”

“It’s alright,” Rey said, a bit too hastily. “I don’t have… soda, or anything. There’s just tap water. There was, I mean...”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Ben said. “Rey, I’m so sorry about… last night. Everything. I can’t even remember half of it but… I remember enough. I don’t usually drink. I mean, I don’t drink. Anymore. Last night was… You probably can guess why.”

He sounded so awkward, so despondent and hesitant, Rey had taken pity on him before she’d even realized what that emotion was.

“It’s okay,” she said. And it was. “You don’t have to explain.”

Ben let out a shaky breath. “Thank you.”

His voice was very soft. And there was a sweetness to his full mouth that made him look almost boyish. It was such a change from the image of him that she’d seen that first day at the shop: Cold, aloof, calculating.

He wasn’t at all what she’d pegged him as. Rey felt… humbled by this revelation. But she said nothing.

Rey pulled over a chair for him, and sat down on a stack of crates beside him at the old table. It was oddly intimate, sitting beside him. She realized, as he began to unpack the bags and set out the plastic containers, that she could’ve easily sat opposite him. But it’d be more awkward to get up and move the crates over, and Rey was way too distracted by what he’d brought.

“Where’d you go?”

“Um, Sawadee, down on fifth?” he replied. “The one with the… flags out front, and the—”

“Wooden elephants,” Rey finished, already pulling a container of skewered chicken in her direction. “This smells so good, thank you.”

“It’s the least I could do.”

Rey tried to imagine him walking down there, clad in his black leather jacket, white tee and black jeans—and, of course, those aviators—and ordering one of everything from the looks of it. She opened up the container and unwrapped the skewers from the tin foil, reveling in the sweet-spicy smell of them, selecting one for herself. Remembering how the barista had looked at him, the way she’d practically panted out his name… Rey took a bite of the chicken and wondered if the cute waitresses at the Thai place fell all over themselves for him, too. It turned a sour twist of jealousy in the pit of her stomach, which was, objectively, absurd. She had no claim to him. No interest in him. Not even if his—

“Is the chicken okay?”

“Yeah,” Rey said, looking up at him abruptly and forcing a smile to her face. “It’s delicious.”

“Good,” he softly replied.

And then, he took off his glasses, folding them and tucking them into the neck of his t-shirt. He did look bleary, Rey noted; there were shadows under his eyes, and a wince when he glanced out at the sunlight streaming in through the window. Something like a crease ran down his cheek, from under his eye to his stubble-shadowed jaw; he must’ve slept face-first on his pillow.

“Here, let me just—” Rey hopped up from the crates, reaching for a few of the leftover pages she’d sent on accident to his printer. She taped them together, then taped the makeshift curtain to the window, covering it up most of the way. “Better?”

“Yeah,” he said, although he was looking at her like he’d just figured something important out.

Rey wasn’t about to ask what it was. She sat back down on the crates, and thanked him when he pushed a napkin-wrapped fork and spoon her way.

It was way, way too much food for two people—even with Ben’s healthy appetite. He’d bought two kinds of curry (‘They’re both dairy-free, though,’ he’d helpfully provided,) and a massive amount of Pad Kee Mao with pork and tofu. There was a container of soup, too, spicy and fragrant and creamy-smooth with coconut milk and lemongrass. Rey had mugs and mismatched cutlery, and they ate by sharing the containers back and forth, too hungry and hungover to try and be polite.

Finally, when they’d ploughed their way through entirely too much food, they sat back, sighing, staring down at what remained; it was a lot, still. And there was no reason, now, not to talk about the giant carved wooden elephant in the room.

“I want to apologize—”

“Ben, you don’t—” Rey spoke over him on accident. She halted, feeling her cheeks color. “No, you go.”

He sighed, and raked his hands back through his hair. Rey tried in vain not to notice the gesture. It didn’t work at all.

“You were right. I do need to… talk to someone. It wasn’t fair to just dump on you.” He sighed. “We hardly know each other, and if I put you in a position… I’m sorry.”

His hair was still sticking up a little in the back from how he’d mussed it; Rey had to fight the urge to go fix it—to go touch him, anywhere. The feeling made her uneasy, like she was someone other than herself in this moment.

“I think that’s probably a good idea, talking to someone,” she said, coming out of her thoughts and back around to what he’d said. “I really didn’t mean to bring up such a painful topic with you, either. It’s just you looked so sad out there, I thought… if I was your friend, I’d want to…”

Her voice trailed off. He was looking at her again, that searching, newly-aware look.

“What?” Rey said.

He shook his head. “Nothing, I just… thank you. It _was_ personal, and it is painful, but… I was glad to have someone there. Even if I did get completely shitfaced and show you how much of a goddamn idiot I am.”

Rey smiled at this; the tone of his voice was self-deprecating, like a bandage of ease and humor to cover over a still-tender wound beneath. They looked at each other for a long moment, and Rey almost shivered at the change in the mood between them.

He felt it too; she could tell.

“I’ve never…” he began, but the words halted in his mouth. “I don’t have anyone else, to… to talk to, like that.”

Rey felt her heart give a little lurch; she knew entirely too well what it was like, being left alone with a cloud of painful memories, unprocessed grief and loss.

_I could be your friend, Ben,_ Rey thought. _I could be more than your friend, too._

But she didn’t say it. Instead, she cleared her throat, and glanced up at the exposed beams overhead. “So, you can see for yourself, I don’t really entertain.”

“It was the milk crates that kind of gave it away,” he replied. “Still, I like what you’ve done with the place.”

Rey almost laughed out loud at the wry tone of his voice. “No you don’t. It’s a hot mess back here. You see how nice the formal dining room looks in your house.”

“This place could be beautiful,” Ben agreed. He reached into the bag and pulled out a smaller container: Mango and sticky coconut rice. “You want dessert?”

Rey groaned, leaning back as far as the makeshift chair would allow, folding her hands across her stomach. “If I had any room for it… do you have a hollow leg, or something? I bet you’ve been single-handedly keeping the local takeaway joints in business this past week.”

Ben laughed, and speared a wedge of ripe-looking mango with his plastic fork. “I didn’t exactly come here with a full kitchen setup, y’know.”

There were a million things that Rey could’ve said in response to this. Sensible things. Guarded things. Things that reaffirmed her prior resolution to not give in to his evident charm and their sudden intimacy. Things that wouldn’t have revealed her presumptions about him.

Without even stopping to consider any of those much better alternatives, Rey blurted out: “You can cook?”

Ben stopped, and looked up at her. His face was faintly curious, faintly amused. His brow cocked. “I can cook.”

There was a feeling now in the air between them—a tamarind-scented emotion that, combined with the first real sensation of fullness and satiation in her body, had somehow transmuted her opinion of him before she’d even realized it had happened. Or maybe it had already happened, last night, with the wine and the confessions. Maybe it had happened the moment he’d taken off his glasses, the moment she’d willingly invited him into her space. But it was changed. She was changed. She drew in a breath and watched as his eyes flickered down to the expansion of her ribcage, the rise of her breasts, the way her hands were pressing the fabric tight to her belly.

She was in trouble.

Rey arched an eyebrow at him. Physically, biologically, chemically unable to keep from rising to his bait. “Really?”

He nodded, once. Slowly. “Really.”

Oh, she was really in trouble.


	7. Chapter 7

As the older woman pushed her grocery cart behind them in the aisle, Rey resisted the urge to stand closer to Ben Solo’s side than she absolutely needed to; others might mistake them for a couple, and that would be… well, it would be inaccurate.

No, they were not a couple. He was still trying to develop her block, take her home from her, and she was the sole thing standing in his way, and Rey needed to remember that. She still hadn’t gotten around to telling him that her mind was maybe, sort of, almost made up.

And she was never going to admit to herself, let alone to him, the complex feelings she had inside. That was too dangerous. It was easier to just pretend.

She could pretend a little longer.

At some point, however, she knew it was going to have to end. This weird little bubble, this intense intimacy. Rey felt as if she’d skipped ahead to candyland, and was waiting for the deck of gem-bright cards to bring her right back to the start.

She knew it was coming.

Problem was, it was getting harder and harder to find the line that was supposed to be dividing them. He wanted her house, and she wanted him—no, the First Order—to just leave her alone. Rey wondered if all that money he was offering her would enough to buy an entire floor of the stupid Kylo building. Or if it was enough to buy blackout curtains, too, so she wouldn’t have to look out at the remnants of her old home.

The building he would put in its place. No doubt it would be an equally somber, cold, modern thing. Rising like a gravestone over the empty block.

There was an ominous rattle behind them. It was the only warning Rey got, before the older woman pushed her cart into the back of Rey’s legs, and Rey jumped quickly to the side.

“Sorry,” the woman said, glaring at Rey and clearly not meaning it. Rey watched her as she passed by, only realizing that she’d jumped right over to stand too close to Ben in an attempt to avoid another ankle-level assault.

The old woman rattled by, and Rey glanced over at Ben. He was holding the largest iced coffee she had ever seen—black, no cream, no sugar—which apparently he was using to rehydrate after last night’s binge; Rey knew that if she’d had that much caffeine this late in the afternoon, she’d vibrate into another plane of existence. And he was watching her with a bemused expression as this exchange occurred. Hastily, Rey took a step away from him. So conscious of her own awareness of the warmth of him, the soft scent of pine and cedar and spice that must’ve been in the soap or cologne he wore…

No, Rey corrected, almost without thinking. He wasn’t a cologne guy. She could almost picture him, in the shower, scrubbing his arms, his chest, all of himself down methodically with a soap that—

What was wrong with her?

“Do you like brussels sprouts?” Ben said. His tone was conversational, and if he’d picked up on her inner monologuing, he gave nothing away.

“Um,” Rey said. “I… I don’t _hate_ them.”

“But they’re not your favorites.”

Rey gave him a look. “People have a favorite vegetable?”

“People typically have favorite foods, yes.”

“If you’re hungry, every food is your favorite.” Rey didn’t think much of her somewhat-rehearsed response, but the way Ben stilled beside her… the way he was looking at her now… “What?”

“Nothing,” he said, and it was very definitely a lie.

Rey scowled at him. “Don’t judge me, I know you’ve seen my groceries, and you think you’ve probably figured me out—”

“Excuse me,” a harried-looking father in khakis and a blue check shirt said, looking at them sheepishly while his toddler wailed in the front seat of the cart. “I need to reach the mustard.”

“Oh sure, sorry,” Rey slid to the side, and Ben followed suit, when he really could’ve moved to the other side of the aisle…

The dad murmured his thanks, and put the bright yellow bottle in his cart, bending over his son and gentling him with a kind word and a sweet kiss to the temple. He pushed his cart past them, and Rey watched him go, feeling a fond sort of tender yearning at the sight. That was something she didn’t remember her own father doing.

Then she looked up at Ben, and the blank expression on his face said it all.

“I… tolerate brussels sprouts,” Rey said carefully, trying to negotiate the conversational cart around the tender ankles of his tragic backstory. “I have no strong opinions either way, truly.”

Ben blinked, and looked down at her. Almost like he was coming back into himself. “Alright.”

He put both of the jars of roasted red peppers he’d been holding in his cart, and turned away from her, pushing the cart forward. When one of the wheels clattered in protest, he clenched his hands around the handle of the cart, pushing the misbehaving thing a little as he muttered a curse.

Rey didn’t want to even begin to guess at what feelings had been conjured for him at the sight of a father and son together. That was definitely a conversation for his future therapist. And one she wasn’t having in the middle of aisle G.

Honestly, though. What was she doing, fraternizing with the enemy? Two weeks ago, she’d been coldly rejecting his offer—a really, really good offer, her traitorous mind amended—and now here she was, trailing behind him as he looked up at the signs hanging above the aisles.

What was next, picking out curtains?

“You don’t really have to cook me dinner,” Rey said, catching up with him. “Really, it’s fine.”

“We’re gonna need potable water for the next few days,” he said, and pushed the cart around the corner. “Looks like they’re going to tear up the whole street.”

Rey didn’t have time to wonder how he knew this; she was too busy kicking herself. This was all because she’d assumed he was some pampered toff who was stymied by a packet of ramen. She looked down into his cart. Whatever it was he was making out of peppers, almonds, and pine nuts, Rey had no idea.

“Water, alright,” Rey said distantly. She looked left and right, searching for an empty cart of her own. “I can—”

“Here, I’ll get a few gallons.” Ben was already loading the three-gallon bricklike containers of water into his own cart.

“I’ll pay you back for those,” Rey quickly chimed in. “Seriously, you don’t need to get those.”

He glanced back at her. “No, I want to.”

Rey bit her tongue. _If you really wanted to drive me out, you wouldn’t be cooking me dinner. You wouldn’t be buying me drinking water. You wouldn’t be so nice to me. You wouldn’t make it so easy to feel... So what are you playing at?_

Life was so much easier when people’s motives were black and white. When she could hate him, or the him that lived in her head, anyway, without moral censure or self-judgement. When he was a cold and calculating developer, who only wanted to possess, destroy, and make new, that was so much easier. Once the messiness of emotions got involved, everything became opaque, and confusing.

A not insignificant portion of all of this was that this was the first time a guy would’ve ever cooked her dinner.

 _It doesn’t mean anything,_ Rey thought fiercely. _He’s just apologizing._

She followed him around the rest of the store, giving up trying to guess at what he was making as they passed through the produce section and he added some kind of herbs to a bag. They went along the back of the store, and came up to the meat and seafood department, and Ben stopped.

“Fish, or steak?”

“What?”

“Do you want fish, or steak?” he repeated. “For dinner. Tonight.”

Rey looked down at the counter before her. A whole array of cuts of meat lay out in front of her, blood-red and marbled, tidy in their gruesome rows; instinctively, she started looking at prices, frowning.

“It’s on me,” he reminded her. “I’m making you dinner, so just… do you like fish better? I could get the fish?”

“Sure,” Rey said. “I like fish.”

It had been so long since she’d had steak, even the cheaper sale cuts, she’d started to phase it out of her diet completely. But fish… she’d always liked fish. Ben nodded at her, and then spoke in his usual, overly-confident, borderline-entitled voice at the butcher. Rey hung back, distracting herself with the basket of lemons that had been placed beside the seafood case. Ben went over, pointing at his chosen cut of fish, and Rey made herself look away.

This was weird. He might see it as some sort of misguided attempt at being chivalrous, but all Rey could see was a growing ledger of things to which she would inevitably be held accountable. One day, she’d owe him. Maybe not today, or tomorrow… but her life had taught her to expect it. And the sooner he got this apology-meal out of his way, the better things would be for both of them. Then she could go back to… living her life, by her terms. Fighting the good fight.

He turned to her, catching her eye; the smile that lit up his features made something in Rey’s gut twist, and despite herself, she smiled back, just a hesitant flash, the last bright spark before a sunset.

She followed him to the checkstand, watched as he inserted his card and took the bags from the end of the register. Rey carried the water, a container in each hand, and if he was looking at her arms to judge her muscles and find them wanting, at least he kept it to himself.

Ben took the bags.

“I’m still not sure how you’re going to actually cook this,” Rey said, as they approached the front of his house— _the_ house, it wasn’t his, it was… well, it didn’t matter. “The gas is turned off still, isn’t it?”

The front door swung open, and Ben tossed his keys onto his bed before picking up his bags and walking inside. “I have my ways.”

The corner of Rey’s mouth tugged up, almost involuntarily, as he eyes searched around at his humble accommodations. And yet her feet wouldn’t move. She was still standing outside, still holding the water, when Ben turned back to look at her.

“I…” she fumbled for an answer, a reason, something that would satisfy him. “I’m just going to…”

Hastily, she went to set one of the two water containers down, but Ben was there, looming over her, his gaze imperious. “No, these are for you.”

“No, there’s two, don’t be daft—”

“They’re for you,” he repeated. “Take them.”

Rey looked up into his gaze, surprised and more than a little terrified to realize that there was a heat there, lurking behind his eyes. A heat, and a _hunger_. It was enough to make her forget, if only for an instant, who he was, what he truly wanted. She shivered, although the air outside was warm. And as if he’d been commanded by that little movement, his eyes flicked downwards, to the collarbones exposed by the neckline of her tunic, then over, to the curve of her arm, before he wrenched his gaze northwards, and swallowed.

Rey watched, entranced, at the movement of his mouth and throat.

“Thank you,” she heard herself saying.

The offer to come in, Rey just knew, was on his lips. And yet before he could say it, before he could repeat what he’d so flippantly taunted her with just days before, Rey took a step back. The spell was broken.

“Thank you,” Rey repeated. “For the water. I’ll just… take it inside, then. And then you…”

He cleared his throat, and shoved his massive hands in the pockets of his jeans. “Yeah, out back, I’ll… maybe in an hour? If that’s—”

“That’s good, good, yeah,” Rey stuttered, and nearly missed the first step entirely as she turned to get away from his hypnotic pull. The water in her hands added to the momentum of her body, and she was imbalanced, more than just physically. “See you then.”

He didn’t say anything. Didn’t shut the door, either. Not until she was down on the sidewalk, making her way over to her own house. Then, Rey heard his door shut. The noise reverberated through her bones.

_Fuck._

Rey went inside her own place, kicking the door shut and making a beeline for her staircase in the back. She negotiated the heavy, cumbersome water containers up the stairs and put them on her makeshift kitchen counter, checking the clock as she did.

It was just after four-thirty.

What was she supposed to do for an hour?

 _Not that,_ she amended, as her touch-starved subconscious took the reins and promptly drove the carriage of her own horniness directly into a ravine... _A deep, damp ravine—or maybe a slick, seaweed-ringed hole, into a nice, wet pond—stop that!_

Fine. Fucking _fine._

It was only warmish outside, but inside, there was no crossbreeze to pull away the heated feeling on her skin. Instead, Rey pulled at the hem of her tunic, yanking it off of her head and throwing it in the general direction of her laundry basket. She pushed the leggings down too, and her pants, until she was bare and sweat-touched on the rug in her room, alone, bordered by more than just four walls.

She felt bordered in by her own skin. By the unthinkable desires that were now merrily traipsing through her thoughts. Ben Solo, and the look in his eyes when she’d challenged him. The way his eyes had left heated trails on her skin with every subtle look. Rey moved her hands along her own skin, skimming a fingertip down her neck, across her collarbone, down to her waist…

This was safe, here, alone, in her fantasy; this was safe, and protected, and nobody could hurt her here, or disappoint her. There was no moment before, no moment after. Just this. Just the security of herself, her thoughts, her body.

It didn’t have to mean anything.

Because her heart definitely, _positively_ , was not involved.

The heart wasn’t necessary; her heart might not even be capable.

It was a careful thing, this dance of lies she was leading.

She could pretend, though.

Rey bit her lip, and trailed her fingertips along the crest of her hip bone. She was a little ticklish there, had never liked it when past partners went down on her, because it was always too much sloppy-wet tongue or not enough pressure, but in her thoughts, she could see Ben’s face between her thighs. The image came so stark and clearly to her that her knees felt like buckling.

It didn’t matter what the real Ben Solo thought about her, or this, or any of it; in her thoughts, he was on his knees before her, still dressed in that soft charcoal sweater, the sleeves pushed up to reveal his thick forearms; she’d chide him for wrinkling his nice dress pants, his cock making the front of them wet with his eager stain.

Then he’d nudge against her with that strong, prominent nose of his, maybe groan low in his chest, breathing her scent in. She’d be soaked, standing before him. Soaked, like she was soaked right now, her thighs slick as she pressed them together, body chasing friction to make the fantasy seem more real. He would want her, in this dream; he would beg her for a taste, and she’d be good to him, so good, and let him.

This wasn’t where she’d imagined her fantasy would take her. If anything, this wasn’t typically where her mind went, when she did this… she got herself off to some faceless fantasy lover, most of the time. A handsome celebrity, or a composite crush, or just the idea itself, fucking, being fucked, taking her pleasure and finding a quick, efficient peak.

This was something else.

The Ben in her fantasies was a giving lover. His gaze, Rey decided, would be focused, intense. Just like he was, sometimes, when he looked at her. God, she almost felt dirty, thinking of him like this; the images in her mind were so specific, so filthy… but she couldn't self-censor. Couldn’t put a stopper in the flood of dirty thoughts.

He’d like it, she decided, when she pulled his hair. Directed him where she wanted him. Rey could almost imagine how soft that long hair would be under her hands. If she gave it a little tug, would he groan, or whimper?

 _Both_ , her own filthy fantasies instantly answered.

Her hand slipped between her folds, and she gasped to find herself so swollen and tender already.

She had to slow down. Tease herself a bit, draw it out, make it last, because the way she was heading, Rey felt so keyed-up that she was going to come with just a few rough circles of her clit. And then the fantasy would be over.

 _Let me make you come, Rey._ He’d ask her so nicely. Rey could just tell. She knew he would.

Slowly, she brushed up between her folds from her entrance to her clit, two fingers swiping in a paltry imitation of a tongue. It was enough, just enough, for her to close her eyes and continue the illusion.

“Ben, please,” she whispered, alone, to nothing, nobody. “Please—”

_You sound so good for me when you beg like that._

“Fuck—”

Her searching fingers resumed their circling, steadying in their familiar rhythm. His hands would be so much bigger than hers, he’d put them on her hips and draw her in, hold her close, not let her squirm away from him…

Rey faltered in her rhythm, taking a few hasty steps backward and laying down on her bed. Her head was on the pillow; her left leg bent at the knee, foot on the floor. She spread herself wide for her imaginary lover, the fantasy shifting so that now, he wasn’t on his knees before her any longer. He was between her thighs, wedging his wide body there, angling his cock towards her entrance.

Even in her fantasies, he teases her with it. Knows she likes the feeling of being stretched, that slow insertion… It doesn’t matter that the two other lovers she’s had were quick and thoughtless and fucked like rusty typewriters, jabbing at the keys. Here, in her mind, he is tender, and teasing, and torturously slow.

Rey bit her lip. Her fingers circled her clit, slow, so slow; she can’t let the pleasure crest just yet. Can’t let it be over, can’t return to the real world.

And yet the pleasure built, as if controlled by some outside force. It tugged on her low in her gut, coiling like a spring, desperate for release. She could go and find a toy, she thinks; she could… fuck herself on her fingers, try to fill that clenching, needy void in her cunt…

It wouldn’t even begin to compare, though.

And Rey remembered the outline of him in his loose yoga pants, bathed in golden morning light. She couldn’t stop thinking about what they say about men with big hands, big feet, big noses—

He’d be big everywhere. She just knew he would be… He’d stretch her so good, fill her up, fuck her like she knows she needs him to—

At this, her right hand sped up, and her left hand came to her breast, giving it a tight, almost painful squeeze as she chased the edge of pleasure. _Almost, Almost… there._ Rey came, hard, biting back a porn-worthy squeak. It’s too good, it’s too good, just like this… Even if her fantasy only made it to him filling her with his cock…

As Rey floated back down, fingers wet against her still-shaking thigh, she looked up into the half-finished ceiling above her bed.

He was driving her mad.

These thoughts, these… instincts. She’d never felt like this before, for anyone, ever.

How the hell is she going to make it through dinner, with the rest of this fantasy running through her thoughts? Rey had no idea.

* * *

She briefly considered just… not showing up. Drawing her blinds or taping up more paper, locking the doors, hiding inside to keep from blushing when she sees him next. Because surely he’ll know, when he looks at her.

He’ll be able to tell that she’s done what she’s done, thinking of him.

She washed up, though, washed her hands really well, and got dressed in a passable, navy flower-sprigged dress, with a row of tiny pearl buttons down the front, thin straps, and a pintuck detail on either side of the front opening.

It wasn’t that she’s dressing up for _him_ , she’s just dressing up. For herself. There’s a difference.

Rey took a steadying breath, and smoothed her hair down in front of the mirror. She felt like she should do something with it, something more interesting than the half-up style she was wearing. Like… three cute buns, or something.

She slipped her feet into her sandals, and headed downstairs, and out the back door.

When she got outside, she saw that Ben had changed, too. Instead of the charcoal sweater and the slacks from their earlier shopping trip, he’d changed into his dark gray jeans and a button-up shirt. He looked neat, and crisp, the kind of man who’d be so much fun to rumple and wreck.

He’d shaved, too.

Rey forced herself not to think about that. Instead, she looked at the patio itself. He’d created a little setup outside for their dinner she saw: the folding table she last saw inside, plus two folding chairs and an actual tablecloth. The tablecloth was too small, but the effect was nice all the same.

On the far side of the patio, away from the house, he had set up a small, black, domed grill, which was currently smoking a little. Whatever he was cooking smelled amazing. Rey’s stomach growled.

“Hey,” he said, straightening up a little as he placed the pair of glasses down on the table. “You look… very nice.”

“Thank you,” Rey said. He did, too, but she didn’t say it. And, to her credit, she didn’t curtsey, or twirl, or anything. And she really should feel weird about the way his eyes take a journey down her body, but she didn’t.

She liked it.

He stared at her for a moment longer—then caught himself, muttering ‘oh shit’ and turning back to the grill. Rey stifled a laugh at this, watching as he crouched down to attend to the fish.

His long legs folded as he squatted down, muscles straining against the fabric of his jeans, and for the briefest of sinful moments, Rey was taken back to the beginnings of her private fantasy—Ben, on his knees before her… She pressed her thighs together again, clit throbbing, and tried to ignore it, focusing, instead, on the careful way he removed the fish from the top of the grill with a metal spatula and a pair of tongs, placing it down on the nearby plate.

Rubbing one out was supposed to make this better, not worse.

 _But here,_ Rey thought, _we are._

“It might be a little bit burnt…” he said, standing up with the plate in one hand and the utensils clasped in the other, and _holy shit_ his hands are big, why is _that_ distracting her so much right now? She’s just taken the edge off, and it’s like it hasn’t helped at all.

Her mortal nemesis—okay, maybe that’s a bit harsh, at this point—was standing there with a plate of delicious-smelling food, and all Rey could think of is how perfectly-suited his hands are for the shape of her hips…

Ben set the plate down on his little folding table, his cheeks a little flushed. “Seared greens and halibut, with romesco sauce.”

His voice was low, almost intimate. And for the briefest moment, Rey couldn’t track what he’s saying. Looking down at the bowl of suspicions red… something… on the table beside the fish, she realized that he was telling her what the meal was. She felt like an absolute idiot, then, fumbling and faltering, uncertain and unsure; it wasn’t as if she didn’t know how to sit down and eat a meal, it was just… him, all of him, his overwhelming presence, and the conflict of her own traitorous feelings.

And the palpable fear that she might not be alone.

He was still watching her.

“Thank you,” Rey managed, somehow, to reply. “It looks… good.”

He gestured to the empty seat, and Rey took it, smoothing down her dress and sitting primly. Pretending like she hadn’t just come, hard, with her hand between her legs and his name on her lips. And then he moved beside her, bending over carefully as serving her a portion, adding the other one to his own plate. Then the greens, then the red sauce…

The long line of his body, wide and strong, standing to her left. If she just turned, she could tug at the tucked-in shirt, pull it from his waistband. It would be easy, so easy.

She was going mad. That had to be it. This insane attraction, the thoughts racing through her brain. It was wild and wicked.

Rey wasn’t looking at the food. Couldn’t focus on it at all, despite the scent of it, what it meant, what it represented.

What, exactly, _did_ it represent?

The air felt thick between them as he sat down opposite her. His eyes met hers, held them for only a nervous moment. Because now the air was thick between them, like some other conversation was taking place, one between her body and his. Another layer of meaning that was still veiled from her thoughts, a dialogue that her emotions and desires seemed to know better than her her conscious mind. Rey didn’t understand it, but as she watched him shift, nervously, in the folding chair, she knew that he felt it too.

 _I want him,_ Rey thought.

It was a truth that she could never act upon, and yet one that could no longer deny.

* * *

Rey watched him eat with careful, methodical precision. Nerves had consumed them both, except her reaction was to eat like a garbage disposal, and his was to eat like some kind of a prince—knife in his right hand, fork in his left. Careful and tidy.

She remembered what she’d read about him, his life, and felt the sinking weight of their disparate worlds; he’d grown up in the lap of privilege, and suffered deeply for it. And she… she’d had hardships, and she’d turned out—

Fine.

Or something close to it.

 _Liar,_ she thought.

And the dinner continued on in silence.

It’s really fucking good.

“Thank you,” Rey said at last, when she was more than halfway through her plate. “You really can cook.”

“You didn’t believe me?”

“You’re not supposed to believe your sworn nemesis,” she countered, but there’s no heat in it, and it just made him arch one eyebrow at her.

“Ah.”

The sun’s heat was fading on her shoulders, and in the golden light, his dark hair has picked up strands of brown and amber.

“You’re not,” she said, setting down her knife and fork.

“What?”

“You’re not my sworn nemesis.”

“I should be.”

Rey didn’t know what that was supposed to mean. Instead, she asked him the question that had been on her mind, pressing at her brain, from the first moment she'd seen his moving truck. “Why did you move in, Ben? Why have you helped me from the start, when you say you want me gone?”

Ben looked down at his plate.

His knife and fork were still held in his hands.

“I pitied you, at first,” he said quietly.

Rey recoiled, and he must’ve seen her movement, because he looked up, mouth pressed in a line, eyes searching her face as if he could somehow see the words, locate them, draw them back.

“I did. I saw you, living like that, and I—”

“I have never asked for your pity,” Rey but back, but Ben shook his head.

“I know, I know you didn’t.” He set his utensils down, slowly, on the plate. “I wanted to know who Rey Johnson was, this… girl, who had denied me. I wanted to find your weakness. Instead, I only found my own.”

Rey’s heart thudded to a halt. “What… what do you mean by that?”

He didn’t respond. And on his face it seemed as if a thousand unknowable emotions were coursing, wild as her heart now raced. His eyes went down, again, to his plate. Seeing, but not seeing. Just as she was hearing, but not comprehending.

“Ben… what—”

“I don’t… I don’t want you gone,” he said, very carefully. “I… the house has to be cleared. All of this has to be. But you—”

“What does that mean?” Rey said. “Where else am I supposed to go?”

He looked up at her, and there was suddenly an ocean of unspoken need in his eyes.

Rey looked away. “We don’t even know each other.”

“We could,” he said softly. “We could learn.”

But she just shook her head. “The less you know about me, the better.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“I’m not the kind of person who… can be whatever you want.”

“Why not?” He swallowed, biting his lips, his expression pained. “You don’t have the faintest idea what it is I want, Rey.”

She shivered, even though the sunlight was warm. It was as if she was standing on the edge of some precipice. Ready to fall, or to jump, or to be pulled in, she could not tell. But oh, she wanted to find out.

“Tell me, then.”

“You were unexpected,” he said, like an accusation he aimed at himself. “I didn’t… I didn’t want to feel for you, but I do.”

Rey felt her body clench, her breasts heavy with all the caresses she wanted him to give her.

“You could… move in with me,” he said, voice growing in desperate, transparent need, wheedling like a child who was begging his parents not to leave. “My place, not here, I mean. My apartment; you could—”

“I can’t do that.” _Why not, though?_

“But you feel something, don’t you,” he pressed on. “This, between us.”

“Yes, but… I can’t give you what you’re looking for.”

“Then what can you give me?”

“Tonight,” she said. The word surprised her, but it was the truth. Her eyes felt locked into his, her body magnetized. “Just this. Just tonight. That’s all I can give you. And then… and then I’ll go. I can’t—”

Rey recoiled at the sound of his chair scraping on the patio stones. It was like a gunshot, like lightning striking her veins.

This was madness.

And yet when she looked up into his face, Rey saw in his eyes the true and honest reflection of her own reckless lust.

_Yes._


	8. Chapter 8

One of the better foster homes Rey had lived in, all those years and lifetimes ago, had been a cheery place with a smiling woman and her serious, but nice-enough husband. They’d given her a room with a slanted ceiling and a little art-glass window—Rey still remembered it, the pattern that formed an abstract, jewel-bright bird. They’d offered her a twin bed with My Little Pony bed sheets, and hesitant comfort and what could’ve perhaps been love, if Rey had been allowed to stay there. 

It had been nice. New and different, but nice.

The family had taken Rey to a water park—a huge building that had smelled of chlorine and echoed with the shrieks and laughter of children, splashing in the numerous pools. The biggest one had been a wave pool, and Rey had been as fascinated by it as she had been terrified. The woman had explained that it was pumps, down behind the deepest wall, that pushed the waves in their steady cadence. 

Rey, who at seven years old had never been in anything deeper than a bathtub, had tugged self-consciously at her newly-purchased rainbow-stripe swimsuit and stayed near the shallows. She hadn’t been brave enough to dive right in. Hadn’t trusted that there’d be someone who’d miss her and come pull her out if she went under. 

But she had watched the waves all the time, thinking, wondering. 

She’d wanted to know how it worked, what kind of machine could push so much water. What was the mechanism? Who had designed it? She wanted to know everything. Her mind had been alight with questions.

But more than that, she’d wanted  _ this _ home to be the one where she could stay, a place where a promise to return actually meant something. A place where she could, in time, grow to trust that someone would pull her out, if she went in too deep.

That was how she felt now, with Ben’s hands on her skin, her back pressed to the landing of the rickety staircase that led upstairs to her bedroom. Too deep, too much, too powerful—her body was surging, the ground falling away.

She had strayed, somehow, from the safety of the shallows. It was something ancient and primal between them. Like looking up at the world from the bottom of a glacier-carved lake.

Her heart was pounding a warning, the rush of blood in her ears a siren, warning of an oncoming storm. But the feel of his hands on her skin was like the memory of soft flannel sheets, like promises. Promises that couldn’t be kept, but felt so nice, so warm and cozy, Rey could pretend just a little bit longer.

His touch was a home she could only dream of returning to, one day. 

But Rey, who knew precisely how those kinds of dreams had always turned out, would  _ always  _ turn out, decided to stop thinking, and just  _ feel _ .

Ben made a noise, low in his throat, as he hoisted her up by her thighs, holding her like she weighed nothing whatsoever, rucking her skirt up; the sound of his need, his desperation, rolled through her like hunger, leaving her aching down to the marrow. He was undone, and she was the cause, and oh how the feeling was mutual. Rey whimpered in response, squirming towards the hardness that pressed up against her cunt, squirming away from his huge hands and the way they’d surely tear her dress to ribbons. 

“Ben, you need—”

But he just slanted his mouth across hers again, warm and overeager, like a man long-denied. Like this was what he’d wanted from the start, and not the shell of wood and junk they’d stumbled through on their way to the inevitable. 

Rey clung to his neck, and held on tightly as he walked her up the stairs. 

When they arrived in a tangle of limbs at the top of the stairs, Rey felt more than saw the change in his demeanor as he took in the sight of her bedroom. The slight stiffness in the set of his shoulders, the way his grip tightened on her thighs… 

No. Now wasn’t the time for pity or analysis or whatever it was that made him hesitate. If he wanted her, then he’d have her—right here on her bed, next to her milk-crate bookshelf and under the half-exposed ceiling. This was what he’s have of her, or nothing at all. Rey pulled herself up, mouth colliding with his at a sloppy, eager angle. Her breasts slid against the solid wall of his chest, feeling heavy and full and trapped beneath her dress.

The bed. She needed to be on the fucking bed, and to have him on top of her, inside of her, to ease this furious, desperate ache that was slowly consuming her body.

She needed it—because if either of them slowed down, then they’d stop to reconsider, see the insanity of this moment, and then the spell would break like a soap bubble in the wind.

“The bed,” Rey managed, her hands tangling in his hair; Ben groaned, not faltering or even hesitating as he strode over to the quilt-covered twin bed under he window.

Slowly, almost reluctantly, he set her down atop it.

Then, with a flush on his cheeks and a glassy-eyed look that mirrored her own, Ben took a step back.

“What?” Rey said.

Ben just shook his head a little, like he was in a daze. “I want… I never thought—”

“Shut  _ up,”  _ Rey said. She was splayed back on the bed, legs spread from how they’d been wrapped around his torso, hands back on the quilt, shaking as they propped her up to face him. She didn’t want sentiment—not here, not now. 

That wasn’t at all what this was.

And she didn’t dare put her heart on the line to find out if it could be.

Focus. Take what you want, and let the fire consume you… 

“You’re wearing too many clothes,” she continued, tugging on her dress, pulling it out from beneath her and up and over her head. 

When she cast it aside, Ben wet his lips, and watched in awe.

Rey watched him stare at her breasts for a moment longer, before kneeling on the bed so she could rise up and press her mouth to his. He welcomed her with a soft moan, awakening like a statue come to life, and drew her body close with one arm, almost lifting her up completely. God, he was so fucking tall, his body so solid, so strong. This was madness, the very definition of insanity, but she breathed him in all the same, filling her lungs with him, tasting him, urging him on with her little noises. He kissed like a conqueror, like a desperate man, hands lowering to span her slim waist.

They broke apart, panting, mirroring each other’s wild-eyed  expressions. 

Everything was moving too fast; everything was moving far too slowly. Then, she was pulling at his shirt, trying to open it, fighting with the buttons as she tried to get access to his skin. Rey was trying to find solid ground, dizzy with him, helpless.

At last, he pinned her down to the bed. There was something in his eyes, something in the feel of bare skin making contact, and the way his hips splayed her thighs wide to accommodate the size of his body, that made Rey want to cry.

This was more. This was something more, something else, something delicate, and that was the opposite of what she’d told herself she needed.

_ Let him be forgettable,  _ Rey thought.  _ Let this be enough. Because after… when he’s gone… I’ll drown in the waves, and no one will come for me... _

_ “Rey,”  _ his voice broke on her name, emotion shattering through them, despite her plea to whatever uncaring gods had ignored her.

Instead of groaning his name in response, Rey bit her lip, and opened wider for him. Inviting him into her body.

Not her heart. That was the boundary to which she’d decided to hold fast. Of all the junk in the building, that was the most delicate, the most damaged. The least likely to be repaired.

His hips moved, sliding the length of his cock up against her spread, slick body. The head of his cock rolled against her clit with a jolt of sudden, sharp pleasure; Rey made a low, needy noise, almost a growl, as she writhed in desperation.

“Inside,” Rey whispered. “I need—”

“Yes,” he nodded, and kissed her again, roughly, needily. “Yes.  _ Rey _ .” 

Ben moved his hand down to grip his cock, shifting, lining himself up; the blunt, thick head parted parted her folds, began to breech her—

“Wait!” Rey cried out. The realization washed over her like ice.

Ben paused, his arms and body shaking with the effort. “What? Is this—?”

“Condom,” Rey panted in response, looking up at him, up into his eyes, then looking around the room. “Fuck! I can’t—I’m not…”

Ben’s face mirrored her panic. His cock was still right there, just the tip—wasn’t that what all the boys begged to do? Somehow just the tip of him felt like a fucking fist. Rey felt tears prick at the corners of her eyes.

“You don’t have any?”

Rey shook her head. 

“Fuck!” Ben shouted. Why did his rage only serve to turn her on even more? Rey fought the urge to shift beneath him, to sheathe him all the way and just throw caution to the wind. But god only knew if that was the same choice her own mother had made. So she sobered, and fought the urge.

His face changed; Ben sprung up from the bed with an ungainly leap, finding his jeans on the floor. And it should’ve been humorous, him standing there, naked and triumphant, his cock pointing up at his belly all huge and hard and eager—but all Rey could see was the little square in his hand.

“Oh thank  _ fuck,” _ Rey exhaled.

Ben let out a laugh, and then it was a blur of motion—getting the condom on, drawing him back to the bed, back to the warmth between her thighs. 

He wasted no time, just gripped her thighs and slid home, one thick deep stroke that made all of the air leave Rey’s body as she welcomed him.

_ Fucking hell... _

It had been a while—and he was not small, of course he wasn’t, a man as tall and broad as him would be huge everywhere. Rey let out a needy whimper, but she was too far gone to find her dignity.

He waited for her. Waited for her eyes to open, to find him there above her. Inside her, stretching tight and fucking perfect. When she opened her eyes, she found him; his dark hair hung about his face, and his mouth was still wet with her kisses.

Rey gave him a little nod.

And his hips began to move.

Slow at first, but not for long. This was primal, edging on desperate. 

They didn’t speak. There were no words of love, no begging, no names. Just fucking, hard and fast, unrelenting. It was like he was trying to mark her, with bruises or come or kisses. He held her hips, lifted her, watched her face like he could learn the secret language of her pleasure. He painted her skin with his breath, leaning his tall frame over hers, noisy when he came. Rey groaned at the feel of him, the sounds; with him still stuttering inside of her, she reached down between her legs to rub just above where they were joined, chasing him as she too shouted out her climax, her other hand tangled in his hair.

Ben caught his breath, mouthing against her neck, hips jerking softly as she clenched and came around him.

It was too good. Too much. 

And when, some moments later, he slipped out of her, Rey laughed at his soft curse; he reached down and gripped the base of the condom, forgetting just as she had that there was anything at all between them.

Ben found the trash in her bathroom, and Rey watched him shamelessly as he walked back. There was enough light coming in from outside to illuminate his body, and she drank in the sight of his torso, his lean waist, his legs, his ass...

_ Once is not enough, _ Rey thought, as Ben got back in bed, tucking her up against him, burying his face in her hair.  _ It won’t ever be enough... _

They were sweaty, and the sheets smelled of sex, but Rey didn’t give a shit. 

He held her close, in that too-small bed. Held her, until she fell asleep in his arms.

* * *

In the hesitant morning light, Rey was struck by how soft and young Ben looked in his sleep.

This had been a mistake; she had known that from the start. Accepted it, even. Not every sexual encounter had to be some… monumental, heart-wrenching thing, Rey reasoned. And yet as she lay facing him, watching his shoulders rise and fall with his deep and even breathing, Rey knew full well that this… this had been different.

_ Damn it. _

She’d come to the decision long before he’d fallen asleep beside her. Before he’d even carried her up the stairs. She was going to accept the offer, take the money, and follow wherever it was the next part of her life would lead. Rey had known it, somewhere deep inside, but she’d just… wanted to make this last a little longer.

And it was pathetic, really, how easily she could imagine a different life. A world where they were lovers, and she could wake up beside him every morning. A place where he was an anchor, not a dangerous storm. Home. 

Instinct and self-preservation, however, told her to be guarded. To cast aside those fantasies and face facts. It wasn’t a matter of  _ if  _ he left, it was a matter of  _ when. _

But until  _ when _ arrived…

Rey breathed slowly and evenly, not wanting to wake him. Long black lashes fanned on his cheeks, and the stubble of his beard had begun to come in, black on his pale skin. She was close enough to count every mole and mark on his face, close enough to see the faint lines under his eyes, the ones at the edges of his full, slack mouth. 

_ Fuck. He doesn’t even snore. _

Sure, he was a broken thing, but who the fuck wasn’t? And besides, without her store, she’d need a nice project to fix…

Rey scoffed quietly at this. No, that wasn’t her plan. She wasn’t here to repair him, and he wasn’t here to fix her. People didn’t fix other people. It was just sex. Nothing more. 

A knock from downstairs roused her from her girlish daydreams. Rey froze, waiting. 

There it was again, formal and insistent the way a customer or postal worker wasn’t.

Ben didn’t even stir.

Rey slid from the bed and found her clothing on the floor. The only indication that Ben gave of her movement, or the knocking, was a slight crease on his brows, a clench of his hand at the spot where Rey had been laying. The sheets were losing her warmth.

She turned from him, and went downstairs.

Something like anticipation or fear clenched in her gut as she opened the front door. 

It was the same dark-haired man from before—the one from the water department, who’d been out of business cards…

“Can I help you?” Rey said. Her voice was raspy from sleep, and she winced a little at the daylight.

The man was wearing a suit, and the look he gave her this time was miles away from the friendly, apologetic one from before. He looked composed, assured. Calm.

He handed her his business card. “Miss Johnson, I’m Dopheld Mitaka with Leigh County department of housing, code enforcement division. How are you doing today?”

“I’m…” Rey took the card, reading it. “What’s this about?”

“During an inspection of your property, we’ve noted several serious code violations, including electrical, plumbing, repairs performed without proper permits, and we have reason to suspect that there are additional violations inside the property as well.” He pulled a large brown envelope out from the black briefcase he carried in his right hand, and offered it to her. “Here is the preliminary report. You can review it with a contractor or choose to undertake the necessary repairs yourself.”

“Repairs?” Rey echoed dumbly, her brain still catching up. “What—”

“You have thirty days from receipt of this notice to either perform the repairs and bring the building fully up to code, and pass inspection, or you’ll incur a fine for each week you remain out of compliance. If no effort is made to begin repairs, you’ll be fined and asked to vacate the property.”

Everything went cold.

Rey stared down at the envelope like she could see straight through it. The man was still speaking, but she couldn’t hear the words. 

He turned, finished with his duty and apparently not needing or expecting a response, and walked back down her porch; Rey stared after him, not comprehending.

It didn’t make sense.

She shut the door and tore into the envelope, opened it, pulled the papers out and tried to read them. The list of violations covered three entire pages—the roof, the siding, the patio, the electrical… 

Realization dawned on her.

He—Mr. Mitaka—must have gained her “permission” to inspect the property under the guise of being from the water department… she’d let him onto her property, let her guard down, and now…

There was no way she could do these herself in thirty days. No way she could pay to have someone do them. No way she could eat whatever fine she incurred while she waited. Her savings were nonexistent. She couldn’t wait on sales to somehow cover the costs…

It was over, then.

Rey set the papers and business card down on the counter, by the register, and stood in the silence, looking around her shop.

They’d found a way to ruin her. And it had been so painfully easy, it almost made her laugh.

Rey went back up the stairs.

Ben was still asleep. 

She stripped, and climbed back into bed with him, under the weight of his arm, up against his body. But it wasn’t to fall back asleep.

Sleep was impossible now. Not with the cold chill of reality on her skin. As warm as he was, it wasn’t enough. Against her ass, his erection swelled, insistent and eager. How distant the fantasy seemed now; waking, content and carefree, fucking and—

They didn’t have another condom. At least, Rey didn’t have one. She wondered if the one they’d used last night had even been good, or if it had been expired. That was something that happened, Rey distantly recalled; the heat of being carried in a wallet could wear down the latex. Even now she could be waiting on another huge mistake of her own making. Her house, her life, her body… Somehow the worry hit her and rolled off; she was numb, her skin and sensations dead. 

Behind her, Ben stirred. In his half-awake state, he ground his hips against her, and his hands searched her front, finding her breasts, sliding down between her legs.

Rey was surprised to find herself wet for him. She was a stranger to her own body.

Behind her, Ben surfaced into wakefulness. Mistaking her soft sob for desire, he slipped two fingers between her folds, rubbing there, urging her higher.

This was what she needed. She needed to feel—something, anything. Facing away from his face, his searching gaze, she could pretend some more.

One last time. And then—

“Rey,” Ben said, his voice like burnt sugar in her mouth, sweetly rolling down her body, chasing the cold away. “Rey, let me hear you come, let me see you…”

She turned her head towards the pillow, realizing that his left arm was underneath it, solid and sure… and his right hand, working tight circles and strokes along her clit, made pleasure rise in her veins like he’d magnetized it within her, and was drawing it out through some unknown power.

“That’s it,” he whispered, all warm pride and appreciation. “Let me hear you, I want to learn the way you like it, Rey, tell me what to do.”

“I can’t,” she said, the words coming out on a sob.

And, to his credit, Ben immediately froze.

“Rey? Are you alright?”

All of a sudden, Rey couldn’t bear to be touched. What had once brought her comfort and pleasure now felt like ropes tightening on her body. Burning her. She recoiled away from him, sliding out from under the covers with an ungainly leap, landing on the floor and righting herself. Staring down at him as he lay in her bed, between her floral sheets, his dark hair was a messy halo on her pillow. His body, his touch, was still imprinted on her skin. 

Ben watched her, wide-eyed, confused.

“What’s wrong?”

“It was someone from the city,” Rey said at last. “I can get the papers if you want to see them. Apparently my house…”

Her voice cracked on the last word. Hastily, Rey cleared her throat. “My house has multiple code violations, and I... I have thirty days to repair, or vacate.”

Rey watched Ben go still and silent. Suddenly, it all clicked into place. 

“But you know that already,” Rey said. “Don’t you.”

It wasn’t a question; he didn’t answer it. Not with words, anyway. His downcast gaze, the tightening of his fists, it all said more than she needed to know. 

Rey felt the truth of it hit her like a punch in the gut.

“Get out.”

“Rey…”

“I said get the  _ fuck  _ out.”

“I wanted to tell you—”

“But you didn’t and now here we are,” Rey said, her voice cold and posture composed, almost regal, despite the fact that she was standing there, bare and exposed before him in the unrelenting daylight. “Go. You win. It’s over. You got what you wanted.”

“Rey, listen,  _ please— _ ”

“Now is not the time where you get to talk.” Rey grabbed at her clothes on the floor, coming up with her rumpled dress and wrenching it over her head with so much force the worn threads pulled at the hem. “That was yesterday. The day before yesterday. Some point before you fucked me like it meant something. Before we started playing house.”

“It  _ did  _ mean something, it meant something to me!” Ben sat up from the bed, and under any other circumstance, seeing his dark hair half sticking up on the side from how he’d slept would’ve been endearing, even charming. 

Now, even his eyes burned on her skin. Rey wrapped her arms around her body, guarding herself, taking a step away from him, from the bed. “I want you to leave.”

He watched her, chewing on his words like none of them were good enough. And none of them were. Because they were happening now, after her heart had been placed in the fragile cradle of his hands. After he’d lied to her to get her onto her back for him. It was too late. 

Slowly, he got up from the bed. He took a step towards her, and Rey flinched, years of instinct and childhood fear making her recoil in the presence of a tall, angry man. 

Ben hesitated, and looked her up and down. Whatever it was he wanted to say, he didn’t say it. Instead, he just watched her back up, until her legs hit her dresser, until her hairbrush and mirror rattled faintly against the top of it, arms still crossed protectively over her body. 

Rey watched him, her eyes focusing somewhere beyond his face, somewhere out the window. She could feel herself faintly disassociating from what was unfolding. Like she was somewhere else, observing this like it was some melodrama on a show or in a movie. 

Someone else’s life.

Ben nodded, then, without saying a word. He got dressed. Pulling on his underwear, jeans, and t-shirt. He stuffed his socks into his boots, and held them in one hand. Barefoot, he took a step towards her, and then immediately stopped. 

“Rey, I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. I should’ve told you I knew. I was trying to... “

“How long have you known?”

“I didn’t know—”

“ _ Bullshit _ .”

“—that it would happen like this, this fast,” he continued. “Rey… I thought I could convince you, before it came to this.” 

“Is this how you typically convince people to sell, then?” 

“No. This is different. I  _ felt  _ something—”

“I’m sure you felt plenty of things.”

“That wasn’t what I meant,” Ben said. His eyes were dark with frustration. “ _ Yes _ , I knew about the city’s decision. I knew when Hux came by. And I told him then, like I am telling you now, that I thought there could be some other way to make this work… I knew you by then. You weren’t just a name on a letter; you were a person. You meant something to me, and I thought I could…”

His voice trailed off at the expression on her face. 

“Please,” she whispered. “Just go. Go. I don’t want to see you again.”

Ben nodded, once, and then he went to the stairs. Carefully avoiding walking within a few paces of her. It was a kindness, perhaps. The only kindness he had left. 

His words meant nothing. 

And the moment she heard him leave, out through the back door it sounded like, Rey let out a shaky breath that sounded like a sob. Tears were already streaming down her face—not just for her house, but for her heart. Because for the briefest of moments, she’d been perilously close to falling in love with him. She’d been standing on that precipice, ready to take a leap and soar into something wild and wonderful. Instead, she had plummeted, into the chasm of betrayal.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. 

_ Why did you think it would be any different?  _ A voice inside her head whispered. _ Did you really think that a man like him would be satisfied with you? _

No, of course he wouldn’t. This had all been a game to him. She had cautioned herself against him, and her strongest warnings hadn’t been loud enough. She was an idiot. Falling to her doom for a pair of pretty eyes. 

Rey let out one strangled sob, and then choked the rest of the pain back. She swallowed it down, absorbing it, letting it lay in wait in her belly. Her body still throbbed with the echoes of his skin, but her heart was already cold. She’d made up her mind. 

It was time to leave.


	9. Chapter 9

By the time Rey walked out of her home, Ben was nowhere to be found. 

This was better, Rey thought. Much preferable to a scene. He must’ve already gone off to cement the deal. Gone to grab his expensive smartphone and call in the demolition crew. He probably was gloating, the final resistance gone at last, with nothing to stand in his way. 

Or maybe he wasn’t. Rey didn’t care. She couldn’t warm herself up enough to care. And her chill had nothing to do with the turn of the weather. As if to match her mood, the sunny day had shifted, and the air now bore the staticky weight of an oncoming thunderstorm. Spatters of rain began to hit her face as she briskly walked up the blocks to her destination. In her jeans and sweatshirt she felt somewhere between cold from the rain and over-heated from the humidity. And then there was that icy fear, that rage, which had settled like a stone in her gut, weighing her down.

No: The rage kept her grounded. It prevented her from flying away with her useless, broken fantasies. The way things were, she couldn't afford to have her head in the clouds. 

Rey felt everything, and nothing, all at once.

She had one friend left here. One place to go, when things got worse than bad. Which was definitely now. Before, she might have gone to stay with Rose and Paige, might have knocked on Finn and Poe’s door and—but they weren’t there. Her friends were gone, and only Ben Solo was left. Yet another reminder, another piece of kindling to stoke the fire of her rage hotter.

Rey came up to the green-painted door and pushed the buzzer. The rain was coming down now, and there wasn’t an awning to hide beneath. It soaked her scalp, her sweatshirt as she waited, heart pounding, hoping that Ben… Mr. Solo didn’t drive by and see her. She didn’t want to see him ever again.    
The door opened. And Rey looked up with relief at the man who’d answered it.   
“Rey?”

“Can I come in?”

The man in the doorway nodded. “Of course. Are you okay?”

Rey shook her head, her tears mingling with the rain. “No. I’m really not.”

Anyone looking at Luke Skywalker as he passed by on the street would see a scruffy-looking, fifty-maybe-sixty-year-old guy with longish brown hair and a beard shot through with silver. The man had a presence, though; it was hard to explain. He wasn’t terribly tall, didn’t have a booming voice, and had the air about him like he’d just appeared one day, and walked out of the woods with a story to tell. That was one of the things Rey liked about him. He had the most ageless blue eyes, though, and as they looked down at Rey, they softened. 

He let her in, no questions asked. 

That was the nice thing about Luke. He never pried or pushed or judged. Sometimes he’d volunteer a perspective, but it was always couched in gentle tones, hypotheticals. But he had a space about him, an energy, that made Rey want to share what was troubling her. Rey remembered that he’d been a university professor at one point, before the draft had scooped him up and plopped him down in the middle of the jungle, halfway around the world in a war that could never be won. 

Some men, he’d said, never came back from that war. Some men came back, but their souls were gone. Fractured, shattered. Scooped out and filled back in with rage and violence and regret.

“I was lucky enough, though; I only had to give them my hand,” he’d said once, when they’d first become acquainted at a neighborhood bbq, years ago. Even with his simple prosthesis, nothing really held Luke back.

Now she was here, following him up the back stairs to his two-bedroom apartment which was perched on top of his medical marijuana shop downstairs. Luke had been selling it for longer than it had been legal, but it was nice to finally be able to put out a shingle and make it legit. 

He had spent decades cultivating his own strains, and some of them, the good ones, he sold downstairs. High CBT for the people struggling with ptsd and anxiety; high THC for the people struggling with chronic pain. Both, for the people who were just struggling. Rey wasn’t one to indulge often, but it was legal, and everything else had gone tits-up today, so maybe a little of the herb was the best possible choice. 

Luke gestured to the couch, and told her, gently, to make herself at home. Rey kicked off her shoes by the upstairs landing and sunk into the burnt-orange 70s couch, which he had probably bought in the 70s; it would’ve made him laugh to hear her call it a ‘vintage’ couch. Luke himself probably qualified as vintage, too. 

But thinking about vintage things, old things, just made Rey feel a wave of grief and melancholy. 

Two blocks away, the man she’d bared her soul to, and shared her body with, was carving out the last pieces of her life. Carting them away, his mission finally complete. She was sure of it. Rey felt a sob choke her throat as she remembered the tender way he’d held her. The way he’d made her feel so wanted—not demanding, but giving… had he truly been some kind of… sexy emo honeypot, all this time? 

Had this been his plan all along? 

She needed a smoke. She needed to get high as fuck and forget Ben Solo. Forget her shop, forget ever believing she could have something of her own to hold onto. 

And Luke, the last of the local holdouts, was the only person she knew she could turn to, for solace as well as for substance. 

But to her surprise, Luke didn’t bring out a pipe. Instead, he pulled her a pint of his homebrew, adding a few drops of a tincture he’d made, and handed it over to her with a compassionate, if slightly red-eyed look. 

“You look like you need this.”

Rey took it from him with a nod; she took a drink. 

The beer was hoppy and strong on her palate. Not like the tannic wine, or the smooth sweetness of Ben Solo’s mouth, both of which were equally strong and equally likely to make her do things she’d regret in the morning. 

And oh, how she fucking regretted it. 

“I don’t think I’ll ever be okay with what he did,” Rey heard herself saying, as if from far away. 

She was sitting cross-legged on Luke’s couch, feeling like she was sinking in and in to the old, worn, but surprisingly soft and springy striped chenille fabric. She’d been petting the cushions unconsciously for the last five minutes, fascinated with their texture. Trying to explain to Luke what had happened, where things had gone wrong. 

Time had slipped away from her for a moment. She struggled to maintain equilibrium. To form the words in her mouth, it was like forming bubbles out of chewing gum, pressing the sounds against her soft palate to form them, then pushing them out with her breath. 

“It was just such a fucking betrayal. And it hurts so bad.”

Luke set down his pipe, and peered at her through the haze. “I’m so sorry, Rey. It sounds like he really cared for you.”

Rey blinked. “That’s not… that’s not the point of what I’m getting at, though. It doesn’t matter if he cared for me.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“People who love each other, they don’t hurt each other?” Rey’d ended the statement as if it were a question, because partway through, it had become one. Like she was uncertain, now, of everything. Belatedly she realized she’d called it love. 

Love. 

After a week, and a shag. Ridiculous. 

Luke shrugged, and took a drink of his own beer. 

“We weren’t in love,” Rey amended. “Love is… flowers and chocolates. White picket fences and… anyway that’s not the point. You can’t love someone you’ve known for a week. And I don’t give one single, solitary fuck whether he cared for me or not.”

“That sounds lonely,” Luke said, after another warm silence, after another drink. “And take it from me, I know lonely.”

Luke had never married, never even had a girlfriend or boyfriend as long as she had known him, and Rey had never asked why. It seemed like one of those things that was off the table, even with the depth of their conversations in the past. Something private. Rey couldn’t figure that quadrant of him out, and she supposed she didn’t really have a right to pry, if he didn’t want to volunteer it. 

“He betrayed me,” Rey said, as firmly has her slippery mouth could manage. “He could’ve told me what was happening, and he didn’t.”

“That’s true. He should’ve told you from the start that he was trying to buy you out.”

“He… It’s not the same.” Rey frowned. “It’s not…”

“From what you said… it sounds like he stayed with you because he was concerned about you,” Luke sounded far too sober and rational, compared to how Rey felt. “He could’ve led with the eviction from the start, forced you out.”

“That’s exactly what he did.”

“Is it?”

_ Always with the questions,  _ Rey thought to herself. But… The horrible truth was, Luke made sense. Much as she wanted to deny…

”I need chips,” Rey grumbled, her train of thought derailing abruptly. Luke rose from his wingback armchair and went to rummage around in his kitchen. And Rey leaned to the side, pressing her face against the texture of the sofa’s armrest. Thinking. 

“He was nice to me,” she said softly. Luke came back, and pressed a bag of something that smelled like sour cream and onion into her hands. “Every time I was mean to him, he was nice.”

Luke took another drink; Rey reached inside the bag and was momentarily distracted by the silken crinkle of the inside, her hand taking a journey through all twenty-eight of her senses before reaching the chips down at the bottom. 

“I know lonely,” she said at last, around a mouthful of Doritos. 

“I know you do,” Luke replied. “You, more than most. But you know lonely in your way. Through your eyes. Maybe you can’t see it when it’s someone else’s lonely.”

Ben had been lonely, too. Rey knew this, had felt it, like calling to like each time they’d given themselves over to vulnerability. As much as she wanted to cast him as the villain, the one who had come from wealth and privilege, the one who just came in and took and destroyed because he was an entitled little shit, Rey knew that wasn’t the totality of who Ben Solo was. 

He was a broken thing, like she was. A ruin. He was lonely, too, like her. Not like her, not exactly, but… it was possible, she knew, to be surrounded by others, and still be alone. 

“Why do you care so much about his feelings?” Rey spoke aloud, realizing that she’d asked the question of herself. 

Why indeed?

Luke didn’t hear her. He was looking out the window at the rain. 

Rey sighed. 

It was just.. Too much. 

Ben had lied to her. Or at the very least, concealed the truth. He had known, and he could’ve told her, and then—then what?

Then, she would’ve been angrier with him before they’d had sex. Scratch that: They wouldn’t have had sex at all. 

_ Are you sure about that? _

Rey sighed, and slid further down the couch, closing her eyes. That felt good, even if the truth didn’t.

Luke said something, a response to her query, or another bit of wisdom... His words fuzzed in and out of her fading consciousness, and Rey couldn’t process them. Later, she thought. She’d ask him about it later. 

She was too tired, too bone-weary to keep herself awake. Rey fell asleep to the sound of glasses being washed in the sink, and the memory of dark, pleading eyes, asking her for forgiveness.

* * *

Rey awoke to the smell of nag champa and the sound of Bolivian flutes and birdsong.

She was at Luke’s, then. 

After a moment of faint disorientation—and a twinge of pain in her back from sleeping on the couch—Rey sat up and opened her bleary eyes. In the light of morning, she scanned the small flat, taking in the bead curtain that divided the narrow living room from his bedroom area, the bookshelf, filled with well-worn texts on transcendental meditation, meditation for PTSD, and eastern mysticism, before looking towards the doorway to the right of that, which led to the kitchen.

Fuck, she was hungry. Rey stretched her arms overhead, and felt her muscles stretch and her joints crack. She breathed in, and her stomach growled.

From the kitchen, the soft sounds of someone scraping a pot or pan drew her attention. And then, the smell of food—spicy and savory, yet currently unidentifiable.

Rey stood up.

Like was standing at the stove, scrambling what looked to be enough eggs for five people. He was wearing loose-fitting pants and a sweater that looked to be an old army-issue style, thick knit in olive green. 

He looked over at her, his blue eyes bright and cheerful.

“Good morning. You sleep okay?”

Rey shrugged. 

Luke smiled, and gestured with his prosthetic hand to the coffee machine. It was the one strange outlier in this comforting, hippie kitchen in this comforting, hippie apartment. Sleek chrome and expensive beans, no pods or pre-heated water for Luke. 

“Make yourself at home, Rey,” he said. 

So she did. 

Seven minutes later, Rey was curled up in the corner of his built-in breakfast nook, feeling the solidity of the wooden bench and the warmth of the sunlight streaming in through the window, onto her bare shoulders. The coffee in her hands smelled rich and dark and expensive. 

Luke was a contradiction. A hippie who grew and sold pot but sprang for expensive beans. 

A bachelor who gave better love-life advice than anyone she knew, including the ones who’d been partnered for ages. 

An old man, with a young man’s soul. Tender, despite the fragments of pain that she saw, sometimes, behind his eyes. 

Rey smiled at him as he slid the plate of scrambled… something… in front of her. 

“It’s tofu,” Luke said, answering her unspoken question. “I was out of eggs, and anyway, I’ve been trying to eat clean this month. Hope you don’t mind.”

Rey, who had never turned down free food in her entire life, shook her head. “No, it’s… thank you, it looks great.”

In truth, it looked close enough to scrambled eggs that she might’ve been fooled. At least with the addition of bell peppers, chives, and something that melted on top of it like cheese but also probably was vegan. Rey picked up her fork, and began eating. 

It was good. 

And if she tried hard enough, she didn’t think about the last meal that another man had cooked for her, under vastly different circumstances. It felt like a lifetime ago. 

But that was over and done now. She wouldn’t think about it. 

“Thanks,” she said, after half of the plate was cleared. “Not just for… I mean, for everything. For listening.”

Luke nodded. “Of course. Believe me, it’s been hard seeing Ben come back around, seeing what he did to the place…”

Rey blinked up at Luke, not following. “Come back?”

Luke turned to look at her, his expression confused, but softening. 

“You must’ve been out of it… Ben used to live on this block. He stayed with me the summer his parents nearly split. They reconciled, of course, and Ben… well, he hasn’t been back, and I don’t blame him.”

Rey kept staring at him; she felt like she was missing a piece of a puzzle.

“Ben Solo’s my nephew,” Luke said. “Leia—Senator Organa-Solo—is my sister.”

“Oh,” Rey said. She felt embarrassed at how hard it had hit her last night. He must’ve said already, and she’d been way too deep into the chenille stripes to notice, or process it. 

“We don’t really make a point of publicizing it,” Luke said, by way of an explanation. “She and I didn’t grow up together.”

Rey nodded, but could hardly hear him.

_ Ben is Luke’s nephew…  Because of course I can’t get away from him, no matter where I go, how I try. He’s there. In me, in my past, in the future I can't have... Taking everything from me, before I even know it’s gone... _

She blushed. Focused her attention back on the tofu scramble. 

“So what happened, that summer?” Rey said. “You said he… came to stay with you.”

Luke looked over at her. Slowly, he set his fork down. 

“Ben was…” 

His voice trailed off. 

Something in his hesitation made Rey feel irrationally vexed. She, too, had been on the receiving end of a description such as this… the kind of lovingly exasperated lecture about pity and potential. The kind of thing that was said about her, but never to her. Unless she overheard it, waiting outside the guidance counselor’s office, to whatever caseworker or guardian was there to pass the time. But she stilled her reaction, forced it back down. 

Waited. 

“Ben was hit hard that summer,” Luke finally said. “Leia and Han didn’t always have the best relationship. Oh, they loved each other, but they… things were always difficult, between them. The pressure of public life, the campaign. Things escalated. And after… they asked me if I would take him. Just for the summer, so things could cool down. And of course, I said I would.”

“How old was he?”

“Fifteen,” Luke replied, a shadowed memory crossing his eyes. “He spent his sixteenth birthday with me.”

Rey stabbed bell pepper with her fork, scooped up another bite of the scramble. Her stomach gave a lurch, though, and she set the fork back down. 

“What happened?” she heard herself ask. 

And Luke sighed. 

Why had she said it? She didn’t know. Rey suspected that the story she’d hear next would be, at best, a half-truth. A perspective. Accurate, from a certain point of view. 

“After I came back… Rey, you have to understand. I left the war, but the war never left me. I understand that now. But back then… back then, I had a lot of healing to do. Even I didn’t see it. And I hadn’t gotten used to Ben being around. He’s snuck out one night, gone to a bar, a club, I don’t know. He came in smelling of cigarettes, and in my mind I knew it was him, but the rest of me—my instinct… I was asleep when he came back. I woke up, and there was someone in my house. I didn’t even think, I just pulled the gun out from under the bed. I fired.”

“What?” Rey’s blood ran cold, understanding and horror coursing through her in equal measures.

_ Luke had fired at Ben. His own nephew... _

“I didn’t hit him,” Luke said, as if that was some kind of reassurance. Rey could see the grief and regret in his kind blue eyes. “But… the damage had been done. He left. I don’t know where he went. But he didn’t come back after that.”

“What the fuck did I do to get caught up in the orbit of your fucking messed-up family?” Rey felt sick to her stomach suddenly. “You know what, I don’t want to know any more. I shouldn’t have asked you, I shouldn’t have asked Ben what happened with— I shouldn’t have even bothered.”

“Rey, wait,” Luke said. But Rey had already shoved herself back from the table. 

Distantly, in the back of her mind, she was self-aware enough to realize that this was what she always did, when things got difficult. Too intense, too emotional. She backed out, backed away, ran from it. 

_ Was this exactly what Ben had done?  _

_ Why do I fucking care? _

Luke stood up, too, looking at her with grief in his pale blue eyes. “Rey…”

She was standing in the middle of Luke’s kitchen—a place she’d been dozens of times. Her last friend’s home. The harvest-gold floor tiles were just as worn as she’d remembered, and the nook she’d just left had the same bench, the same turned spindles on the chairs… She’d come here, hoping it was last place where she could be free, a place untouched by what Ben Solo had done. Or what he was. 

Who he was.

Rey let out a soft growl of frustration and disbelief. Of course not. Apparently her entire life was set on a collision-course with this gene pool.

“Is your whole family like this?” Rey snapped. 

Luke‘s face hardened. “You don’t exactly get to choose your family.”

Instantly, Rey felt ashamed. “I know. I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

“It’s in the past,” Luke said, picking up his coffee mug and heading over to the machine to refill it. Or maybe just to have something to do. “Why do you think I’ve dedicated my life to peace? To… healing? Helping others heal?”

_ And why he’s never mentioned any of this before now,  _  Rey thought to herself, awkwardly picking up her own mug and drinking the rest of the now cool coffee.  _ Never mentioned Ben… _

“Maybe for people like me, healing is… just learning to survive. Because I can’t fix this, any of this.”

“Who said it was your mess to fix?”

Luke smiled.

And Rey felt her shame and rage and embarrassment melt. 

“I have to leave this place,” she said, when Luke’s mug was refilled, and he’d taken hers and started grinding fresh beans. “I can’t stay. The house…”

“Where are you going to go?” Luke asked.

She shrugged. “Anywhere. Hadn’t really gotten that far yet.”

Luke gave her an indecipherable look, his smile enigmatic. Maybe even a little playful. “C’mon, I have something I want to show you.”

* * *

“It’s not much, but it’s yours, if you want it.”

Rey was standing in Luke’s detached garage, looking at the 1983 Ford Millennium van that was parked before her. It was airbrushed with a majestic scene of falcons in flight on the side, excruciatingly dated but in pristine condition.

“You can’t give me this,” Rey said, overwhelmed. 

“Take it,” Luke repeated. “I’m not using it, haven’t driven it in months… and it sounds like you’ll need it more than I will.”

“Thank you,” came Rey’s soft reply. She felt overwhelmed by his generosity… like there should’ve been an expectation that went with it. But that wasn’t how Luke was. And it almost seemed, from the wistful glance he gave the van itself, that there were memories attached to this old thing. Memories that maybe he was ready to see drive away.

“Really, thank you,” Rey repeated. 

Luke just gave her a smile, his blue eyes bright. “Take care, Rey. I know you’ll be safe, you’re smart, but… take care of yourself.”

“I will.”

* * *

Rey drove the van back over to her place.

Ben wasn’t there. 

It wasn’t really a shock, truth be told, but something in her stupid heart made her wish that he was, if only to see her leave and have the final say in her own life. Any alarm bells that might have warned her of her own irrationality were shoved behind a mental pillow and firmly ignored. 

It didn’t matter. She was in control of her life, not him, not the First Order, not anyone. 

To her surprise, though, there were three others standing out on the sidewalk, in front of the space between her house, and Ben’s—no, the other house, now. It wasn't Ben’s. Hadn’t been his, ever. He’d only been an interloper, a trespasser. 

“Miss,” one of them, a red-haired man that Rey recognized from the First Order website, called out to her as she stomped up her front stairs. “We need to speak with you… Miss Johnson?”

“Get fucked,” Rey called out over her shoulder. She left the front door open, marching through the rows of trash—it was garbage, all of it, why hadn’t she ever been able to see it?—and up the back staircase. With only a brief pause in the doorway of her little room, Rey set to work. There was a suitcase by the door; she pulled out her clothes from the dresser, her tampons and toothbrush and shampoo and everything she could think of, and shoved it in. Then she grabbed the remainder of the food in her cupboard and added that too, because the suitcase was roomy enough, or her life small enough, that it fit. 

She closed the suitcase, and latched it.

Without hesitation, Rey pulled her workbench away from the wide front window. She wrenched up the window, the old wood screeching from disuse, making the First Order folks down on the sidewalk flinch, and look up. 

Before they could speak to her, Rey pitched her suitcase out the window. 

Hopefully, they were as fast at dodging overhead assaults as they were moving into the demolition phase of projects. Perhaps she should’ve designated this as a hard-hat area. Health and safety, and all that. The red-haired man cursed, and the blonde woman sidestepped with surprising agility, and Rey watched, satisfied, as he suitcase landed down in front of her borrowed van with a solid thunk. 

“Miss Johnson!” the redhead called up to her. 

Rey ignored him. 

The mattress was next. It was a twin, and a quick scan of the window suggested it was wide enough that it, too, could just take the short way down. 

It did. Sheets and quilts fluttered down after it in a pastel floral tangle. Rey chucked the pillows out, too, her breath heaving as if she’d just finished a fistfight. 

She hastily put her favorite books, her mug, her tea and kettle into milkcrate which had been serving as a makeshift side table. Those were too precious to toss, and she couldn’t take them all, but at least she had something. 

This, at least, was familiar. Packing up her things with little notice. Moving away from a house which had never been a home, and going off to whoever wanted to take a scabby-kneed, fierce-eyed little orphan. God, she hated that word. Rey put her extra pair of shoes in the box, and didn’t even look back as she stomped back down the stairs. 

She grabbed the cash in the register. Swiped a few of the nicer pieces from the jewelry tray. That was it for space, and Rey felt fury pushing her onwards. 

Outside, the First Order folks were standing on the other side of the street, looking at her from in front of their fucking idiotic Kylo building. All three of them were on the phone. 

Rey opened the back of the van, and shoved her mattress in first. She put the pillows and the crate and the suitcase in after, and shut the back door. She could sort it all out when she got where she was going. Wherever that was. The where didn’t much matter; it was the when that mattered, and the when was right the fuck now.  

The three of them watched as she got into the driver’s seat. Whatever it was they were saying, and to whom, Rey didn’t give a fuck. She was going. And she was never looking back. 

“Rey!”

A familiar voice called out to her. Achingly familiar, pained in a way that made her gut twist and her heart give a traitorous lurch. 

_ Ben… why couldn’t you just let me leave... _

Rey looked over at the Kylo side of the street, but it wasn’t coming from there. Hastily, she took off the parking break, and put her foot on the accelerator. The van started moving. Despite the age of the van, it had more than enough power in the engine. 

“Rey!”

She flinched, and looked to the passenger side; Ben was there, running up beside the van, his hands on the edge of the window. His face looked stricken. 

Rey kept going. 

“Rey, please!” He tried again, walking to keep up with the car, following her even as she negotiated around the roadwork and went into the street. 

“Get off!” Rey hollered at him, over the roar of the engine. “Let go, you’ll get hurt.”

“I’m sorry,” he was saying. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, wait, please!”

She pushed down on the gas. And the expression on his face the moment before he let go was one that would haunt her forever. 

It was done. 

Her whole world, her house, and Ben Solo were in her rear-view mirror. He was standing there, in the middle of the road, with his hands cupped around his mouth. Whatever it was he was yelling at her, Rey couldn’t hear. It was over. 

She was alone. 

She was free. 

_ So why is it different this time? _ she asked herself, as the tears refused to come.  _ Why does it hurt?  _

_ And moreover, how am I going to get my fucking money now?  _

There were no answers. So she kept on driving, and didn’t look back.


	10. Chapter 10

“Well, that went well.”

Hux’s nasal voice pierced through Ben’s thoughts like an ice pick direct to the brain.

In the distance, the last fleeting glimpse of that achingly familiar white van shifted, then turned, disappearing behind a row of buildings four or five blocks north of where Ben now stood. Rey was heading for the freeway, then, if he had to guess. That was the fastest, easiest route that would take her far away from him. The shifting autumn winds blew a kiss of heat across his face, an echo of the exhaust as she’d driven away.

She was gone.

His heart still thundered in his chest.

This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. She was supposed to stay, to listen. To understand…

But she had left him.

Ben knew, rationally, that what he had done was his burden to bear, not her choice to apologize for. He’d pushed himself into her life, when she’d been clear about her wishes. He had been a threat to her, right from the start—even before she had known his intentions had changed. Even before he himself had realized it… and Rey hadn’t owed him a damn thing, not her time or her body or her affections, but instead she’d given him everything. Everything, and then nothing.

_You win. It’s over. You got what you wanted._

She was wrong.

This wasn’t what he’d wanted at all. Damn the house. Damn that fucking house, and the fucking building, all of the plans, everything. He hadn’t wanted anything but her. Slowly, Ben lifted a hand, rubbing at the stubble on his chin, wiping across his mouth. What had he done? Why had he been so fucking stupid...

Then Hux’s words caught up with Ben. And that old familiar lick of ink-black rage skimmed along the edges of Ben’s vision as he turned.

His fist was already clenched, nails biting half-moons into his palm.

And the punch would’ve connected, if it hadn’t been for the sight of Gwen Phasma, rushing across the street in heels the way that only she could manage, with a panicked look on her face and a cell phone clutched in her hand.

“It’s him,” she said, handing the phone to Ben. “Go on, you’ve fucked this up enough, you can’t—”

“Give me the _fucking_ phone,” Ben snarled, and snatched it from her red-taloned hands.

“What.”

Ben’s voice was flat as he pressed the phone to his ear. On the other end, Richard Snoke’s voice was horrifyingly calm.

“Am I to understand that the tenant has been persuaded to vacate, or is there going to be another excuse and another delay?”

“She’s… yes,” Ben said, swallowing thickly, trying to compose himself. “She’s out. But I don’t like this. I don’t like how this was done, Rich.”

“It’s not your fucking job to like how this was done,” his boss’ voice was mocking, cruel. “ _How this was done…_ you mean what you did? You don’t like it? I’m all astonishment. You, finding something resembling morals, at this stage in the game.”

“I did exactly what you _told_ me to do,” Ben snapped. “And it didn’t work. Then I tried it my way. I went to her, I talked to her, I tried to make this on the level. But you crossed a line.”

On the other end of the phone, Snoke just laughed. “Lines don’t matter for people like us. Remember who said that gem of a platitude to me, _Benjamin_?”

Ben felt his blood run cold.

“ _You_ did,” Snoke continued. “Back when you first came to me. And oh, you were so very sure of yourself… The Metro job, you remember that one?”

“I remember.” Ben’s voice had diminished nearly to a whisper, guilt in his throat, clawing the very sound to silence.

That job… he didn’t want to think about that job. What he had said, what he had done, the man he had once been. It had all come together within a year of what had happened, with his father, with the… the first time he’d slipped deep into his addiction, seeking solace and forgiveness down at the bottom of an uncaring bottle. Standing in the middle of the blocked-off road, with the construction workers waiting to start, Ben stared at Hux, redirecting his tortured memories into the present; he was imagining how satisfying it would’ve felt, to feel his fist connect with that sniveling ginger weasel’s little weasel nose. Feeling the crunch of bone, the heat of the blood.

Fuck. He needed a drink. Just one, maybe.

Ben clenched his hand, but kept it down by his side. He forced himself to keep it from shaking.

“You had an audacity to you, back then,” Snoke was saying, his voice like poison in Ben’s ear. “You had a real spark. You’d do anything to get to the top. And now... “

“It didn’t have to happen this way.” Ben knew the moment the words had fled his lips how pathetic he sounded. It reminded him all too keenly of the way he’d beg his mother to stay, just a little bit longer, just another hour, twenty more minutes, five. “Getting the city involved? She could’ve… she would’ve changed her mind.”

Snoke laughed. “You knew that our methods had been effective in the past. You knew it would’ve worked, and yet you hesitated. That’s what caused all of this. Sentiment—your feelings, your weakness. There isn’t anything different about her, about this property. It’s you. You’re just a child, throwing a tantrum in an expensive suit. Pathetic.”

Ben heard the click of the line as Snoke hung up. Slowly, he lowered the phone from his ear, clutching it so tightly he felt as if he might shatter the screen. His knuckles, when he looked down at them, were bone-white.

He had trusted Richard Snoke for years. Given him years of his life, the most ruthless and dedicated service, to achieve his grand vision for what a city could be… Now, that trust shattered with the simplest of words.

Nothing different about her? There was everything.  

“What’s the next step?” Hux said. “Do we proceed? We’ve got to really speed up the demo if we’re going to make up for the time you’ve wasted.”

Ben closed his eyes.

He could still see her, the softness of her smile, the warmth of her hazel eyes, the curve of her mouth, her waist, her breasts… For fuck’s sake, her taste was still on his lips. There was so much of her that he—

Abruptly, Hux yanked the phone back out of Ben’s clenched hands, pulling him back into reality.

Back into the horror of the here and now.

_Focus. Breathe. Stay in the moment…_

Fuck. How fucking ironic was it that the voice he heard now was—

“I’m calling it in now,” Gwen was saying.

Ben’s eyes snapped back open. “No. Let me handle this. This is still _my_ project. I need to make a few calls.”

Gwen narrowed her eyes at him, but nodded. Her own sleek phone went back into the pocket of her crisply tailored suit jacket.

Without another word, Ben turned, and went back into the house. He forced himself not to look to the right, at Hux and Gwen, nor to the left, to Rey’s house, as he went, but the broken glass crunched underfoot regardless, and Ben couldn’t not see what lay there on the sidewalk in front of her porch.

A book.

He picked it up. The clothbound hardback cover was solid and real in his hands the way the current situation wasn’t. Maybe things had stopped being real the moment he’d met her. The moment she’d looked at him in her store, stood across the counter from him and told him that she wasn’t interested in selling, and that nothing could change her mind. His thumb traced along the worn, gilded title, nearly rubbed off of the faded blue cloth cover.

_Persuasion._

Something in him found this absurdly funny, as if Rey was going to walk up to him at any moment, take the book from his hands, fix him with a smile or even a glare. She could slap him, beat him, scream at him—he deserved it, all of it, and more—do anything.

Anything, but be gone for good.

Ben looked up at her house, at the broken window, the way the curtains still fluttered and clung to the ruined glass. Everything was a ruin.

Still holding onto the book, and not giving a singular shit whether Hux and Gwen were still watching him, Ben walked up the steps and into the house that had been his prison, his escape, for the last few days.

He shut the door behind him.

And then he picked up the folding chair by the door and hurled it across the room.

Rage blossomed out from his pores like a surge of a sudden summer storm. He felt it down to his marrow, the frustration, the anger, the helpless grief. The chair hit the side of one of the bookshelves that flanked the fireplace, rebounding off of it, not even denting the solid oak. He howled, and threw the folding table, too. The hollow poles of it clanked against the brick of the fireplace, a small noise relative to the rage in his ears. It echoed into silence again, that pressing silence.

He caught his breath, body hunched and shaking in the center of the space.

The table had chipped the bricks.

It didn’t matter; all of this would be gone tomorrow anyway.

Ben clenched the book in his left hand, pressing his mouth shut to keep from screaming. Through the pounding of his heart and the rush of sound clouding his thoughts, it took him several long minutes to collect his breath, to come back into his body and realize that the spike of pain coming from his palm wasn’t just from how hard he was clutching the book.

A shard of glass had been trapped between the pages. And when he raised his shaking hand to examine it, blood welled up around the fragment.

It soaked into the book, smeared a dark and accusatory stain on the cover. Another thing he’d ruined.

Pale blue, delicate gold, all soaked with a red so black it might as well have been oil.

There was no blood in his veins. Snoke had seen to that—no, it was not wholly Snoke’s doing. Ben knew that it was not.

“Fuck,” Ben said. And then, again, louder: “Fuck!”

He let the bloodied shard slip to the floor, where it clattered on the hardwood. Ben grabbed at the pillow on his makeshift bed, wrenching the pillowcase off of it and wrapping it around the cut in his hand. It would need stitches; at some point, he should probably attend to it.

But there was work to be done, first.

Loose ends that he himself had frayed. They deserved to be tied up, if it was the last thing he did.

Ben found his own cell phone in the pocket of his jeans. He grabbed at his laptop and sat down on the mattress on the floor, opening it, typing his password one-handed.

He made the call.

* * *

_This will begin to make things right,_ Ben thought, even though right was a shade of gray, and better was an abstract concept anymore. His hand throbbed, and his phone, set to silent, buzzed insistently at his hip. But this… this might be the first step. The rest of it?

Well, he’d have to wait for the rest of it to either fall into place, or fail spectacularly.

Whatever Hux and Gwen had heard, they stayed away from the house as Ben worked. They had worked with him long enough, been privy to his moods and his intensity to know when to leave well enough alone.

Either that, or they were running back to Snoke, taking the chance to push him out before he could do more damage, in their eyes.

Fuck it. Ben didn’t have time to theorize about their opportunistic views. There was work to be done—real work, meaningful work. Whether it mattered anymore… at least it mattered to him. Even if she’d never know, never see it…

For her, he wanted to be enough. And that was truly saying something.

All of his life, Ben had been either too much, or not enough.

He’d always wanted too much—too much attention, too much validation, too much reassurance. His moods had been quick and angry. ‘Troubled,’ the word that had appeared all too many times on evaluations and in the notes of visits. His mother had been busy, and his father had been distant, but he had known, even as a child, that other kids did not rage the way he did. They didn’t feel so deeply, ache so desperately. He didn’t have the words to name it, but it came out anyway, painted on his bloodied knuckles, echoing in his rage. When he’d found his first taste of liquor, breaking into his father’s not-so-well-hidden stash at the age of fourteen, Ben had found that too much could be just enough, so long as he used the buzz of alcohol to regulate the rest of his desires.

Before long, even he had known that he was a lost cause.

It’s an interesting feeling, knowing you’re the family disappointment.

And for Ben, it was as if he was a twin, as if the invisible, better-behaved, ideal son that his parents actually wanted somehow haunted his and all their steps.

The Ben Solo who smiled for photos and played little league and went to robotics club after school, not the one who learned the word _Fuck_ and promptly tried it out on the teachers first.

The years had smeared by like a child’s handprints on the window of a station wagon, picked-off happy-face stickers and perpetually riding backwards, always feeling like he was missing something, something important, that everyone else around him knew and felt and did intuitively.

Then, his father.

That wound still ached, too.

Rey had listened, when she could’ve turned away. He’d been drunk and sloppy and the memory of it had been mortifying, the way he’d acted, what he’d confessed. There’d been something in her eyes, some shifting light, that pulled him close, though. Something intrinsic to her, the softness of her, hidden and concealed, delicate; watching her relax around him had been like watching some ancient, deadly creature laze about in the sun, finally turning and exposing a soft underbelly. The place where the armor was weakest.

The place where it was easiest to wound.

“God _fucking_ damn it…”

His hands were tied, and he had been the one to slip the knot. But maybe there was a way…

Even the thought of it, the faintest possibility of it, seemed so remote, so ludicrous, Ben could hardly consider it, if it weren’t for the thought of Rey. The flash of fire, pure hatred in her eyes. And then, chasing on the heels of that memory, another one: Her languid gaze, her softly-parted lips when he’d entered her. The way she’d clung to him, opened herself for him, accepted him.

Her hands, carding through his hair.  

The soft prayer she’d made of his name.

He had to try.

The risk of it was… it might just be worth it. Not that he even thought he’d have a hope of finding her, let alone receiving her absolution for what he had done. But maybe, one day, she would return here, and she would know…

Impossible. Or, if not impossible, improbable. And risky. And unthinkable, given how he knew Snoke would react…

And yet here he was, thinking of it.

He had to make a choice.

There was really only one place he could go. One connecting link—although it was the last place he wanted to be, right now. But for Rey, he would do it. If there was the slightest chance that he could repair the damage he’d done, then he would take it—and confront the past that still, even now, haunted him.

* * *

Luke Skywalker was _old_.

The realization hit him as he stood at the base of the steps, looking up into the somewhat hazy staircase. Looking up, into his uncle’s eyes.

It was a possibility that the young never really consider: That their parents, their mentors, their family might get old. That they might age, and decline, and die, leaving a gap and not a tidy, tied-up parcel of a life that could be easily stored on a shelf. Han had died after a life lived hard, and to the fullest; it had still been tragic, still had wrenched Ben’s world into turmoil, but as more than one obituary had said, Han had died the way he’d lived, racing, pushing himself. Driving away from his problems.

His mother, Ben expected, would live forever, just out of sheer spite. But Luke...

Luke, now, here, before him, was an entirely different story. Because the sandy hair had changed, to ashen silver. There were lines in his face, etched from grief. Ben had known all his life that there was little resemblance between him and his uncle, but in that, at least, there was a sort of sad kinship.

Still, after everything, it was difficult to stand there on the steps, and look into the eyes of the man who’d fired on him in the darkness. The man, the family member, who was supposed to shelter him from the storms of his mother’s imploding political career, his parents tumultuous marriage..

He felt like running.

This had been a bad idea.

But then, with a note of incredulity and… resignation to his voice, Luke spoke: “Ben…”

“Is she here?”

His uncle didn’t try to pretend like he was confused about who ‘she’ was. He just shook his head.

“No, but she spent the night last night,” Luke said. “On the couch.”

The possibility of Rey being here and sleeping on anything other than the couch had not even occurred to Ben, but his eyes must’ve betrayed the depths of his pitiful territorially about her. And besides, despite everything, Luke still knew him. Ben had never been exactly subtle. Luke was still searching his face, though.

“Do you know where she went?” Ben said. “Where she was heading?”

Luke hesitated, just for a fraction of a second, then shook his head. “Other than north, no. Ben, will you come inside, please? We can… talk.”

Those blue eyes… the last time he’d seen them, Luke had been standing in the living room of this very house, shaking hand clutching a handgun, the echoes of the single gunshot still reverberating through his body. Even if the bullet hadn’t hit, the wound had been made. And it had not healed over in the intervening years.

In both of them, it seemed—because Luke’s eyes were watery, pleading. Apologetic.

Ben swallowed. This wasn’t about him any more. It was about Rey. And for her, he would do this.

“Sure.”

* * *

The years had changed them both. Ben did the math in his head as he followed his uncle up the stairs, even though it was unnecessary; it had been just before Thanksgiving, just a few days after his sixteenth birthday, when Luke had… when it had happened.

Half of his life, the before, and the after. Sixteen years had passed since that day, and yet the sight of that couch, that living room, that world…

Ben hesitated at the top of the stairs, until his uncle, continuing on into the kitchen, muttered a gruff but not unkind: “Go ahead and have a seat, lemme take a look at your hand.”

Without thinking, Ben clenched his fist; the sting and ache of the cut jolted him out of the memories that seemed to be overlaid with the here and now. He’d stopped on the way, gone into some convenience store and bought a package of travel tissues and a tiny roll of medical tape, tried to rig up a bandage. Of course he’d bled through it.

Ben stared at the couch.

He looked around the room, noting what had changed, what remained the same. All of it was worn and settled into place as if this place had somehow grown up from the earth itself, from the jagged, dated stones that framed the fireplace to the bookshelf and matching coffee table.

And the couch…

Rey had slept here last night. Ben wondered if she’d known that this had been the place where so many of his own dark memories were given life, or if she had slept soundly.

Ben avoided the couch, lowering himself into the overstuffed plaid armchair and folding his feet like he had as a child, ankles bent, too-long legs in a too-short space, as always.

He put his left hand on his knee, palm-up, and began to pick at the already peeling tape.

When Luke came out of the kitchen, carrying a red zippered pouch, Ben flinched.

Luke saw. Because of course he had seen.

“Ben, I—“

“It doesn’t matter,” Ben said, low and half-pleading for the memories to leave him alone, after all this time. “It’s fine.”

“I don’t keep guns in the house anymore,” Luke said. “I want you to know that.”

Ben looked up at him, and nodded, once.

Luke slowly sunk down onto the coffee table, and he set the unzipped first aid kit down beside him. Ben stared at the worn spots on his uncle’s loose, tan, linen-looking pants, wondered anew at how the intense, fiery man he’d once known had turned into this mellow… well, hippie. Because it was evident from the nature of the shop downstairs as well as the scent permeating the room upstairs that his uncle had found at least one very obvious method of relaxation.

Ben had only tried pot once or twice, in college; whatever strains his friends had found had the opposite of the intended effect, and he’d felt more anxious, more paranoid, and he’d vowed never to try it again. Maybe it had been more than just pot, he didn’t know and wasn’t going to betray his ignorance in asking.

He peeled the rest of the tape off of his hand, and the top few travel tissues came away with it.

Ben winced.

“What’d you do?” Luke asked mildly.

“To my hand, or to Rey, or to life in general?”

Luke, who was putting on a latex glove and laying out supplies, gave his nephew a wry look. “Pick one.”

Ben sighed, and peeled back the increasingly blood-soaked layers of tissues. “Piece of glass did this. And the rest… _Fuck_.”

Sixteen years ago, Luke’s sharp look would’ve been paired with an admonishment about watching his language, but Ben only got the look today. That, strangely, calmed him. Even as the last layer of tissues came up, and the wound beneath was revealed.

Luke’s quick intake of breath echoed Ben’s sentiments exactly. Carefully, his uncle reached for the little can of numbing spray. He applied a quick, stinging mist to the injury, and the pain of it made Ben curse and flinch again. But then it started working.

Slowly, Ben set his hand back down, and his uncle began to clean the wound.

“It’s not too deep,” Luke said, as Ben looked away. “It probably won’t need stitches. Which is good for you, because I don’t have the tools to do that here, and I know how you used to feel about hospitals.”

Ben grunted an acknowledgement; Luke had been the one to take him in, when, at around age seven, Ben had fallen off of his bike and broken his arm. The pediatric emergency room doctor had been one of those smiling, happy-slappy types, and had refused to stop talking down to him, and Ben had taken a swing at him and had to be bribed with a Lego Technic set just to calm the fuck down enough to put a cast on. He smiled faintly at the memory. No, he did not like hospitals.

Luke worked slowly, silently, efficiently, for a man with one hand and a prosthetic that was little more than a hook. Ben stared at the bookshelves, trying to steady his own breathing. The numbing spray worked, but only just; when Luke found a tiny shard of glass still embedded in the skin, Ben had to grip his right leg with his other hand and force himself not to move.

And the whole time, the history between them mingled with the pain of the recent events, until finally, it was Ben who broke the silence.

“Did she know about you and me?” he asked quietly. “She… you knew her for a while, didn’t you.”

“I met Rey Johnson shortly after she bought her place,” Luke said, his attention still mostly focused on applying tiny bandages to Ben’s palm, drawing the wound together. “I never though to tell her who my family was, and she never asked. She’s a good kid.”

At this, Ben glared at Luke. As if he could feel it on his scalp, Luke looked up at him.

“Alright, she’s not a kid,” Luke conceded.

Ben relaxed, but only a fraction. “Fucking right she’s not...”

Luke smiled faintly, then looked back down at Ben’s hand.

“She’s very capable. Very smart. Stubborn, but you’ve probably figured that out already…”

“You gave her the _Falcon_.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

Luke sighed. “She said she needed to go. To be away, to think. And I’m not using it… won’t have much need for it...”

There was something in the way he said it that made Ben still. Without having to ask, without even having to pry at all, Ben just knew that there was more to that statement than even Rey had known.

“How long?”

“How long have I known, or how long do I have?” Luke replied. His blue eyes met Ben’s, sad and wise and knowing and resigned, all in one painful instant.

“Both.”

“I’ve known about the cancer for about a year now. Tried treatment; didn’t work. Too fast-moving, too aggressive. So I took myself out of the program. That’s no way for a man to die, surrounded by… wires and tanks.”

Ben swallowed, throat suddenly thick with emotion. “And how long do you have?”

Luke smiled up at him. “How long do any of us have?”

“Don’t give me some fucking _bullshit_ answer—”

“Do you want to be the man you are, for the rest of the time _you_ have, Ben?”

The question shook him into silence. Instantly, the anger of his youth, finely honed to the rage-sharp stiletto point, rose to the surface. “I wasn’t the one who—”

“No, you weren’t. I was the one who did that, and believe me I have lived every single day of my life remember the look in your eyes.” Luke’s voice shook with sudden vehemence. “I failed you, Ben. I’m sorry.”

Ben was silent.

“I have done my own soul searching, in my own time,” Luke continued. “Have you done the same?”

Ben felt tears prick his eyes. Suddenly the shame of it washed over him. He blinked back the tears, but they fell just the same. “I’m being torn apart,” he said, words coming out on a strangled whisper. “Everything I’ve done, everything I’ve… What do I do?”

“Are you seriously asking a pot dealer for advice, Ben?” There he was: the sardonic young man who had once been his idol, his mentor… not his nightmare. Not any more.

“No,” Ben laughed, lifting his right hand to wipe at his face. “I’m asking my uncle.”

Luke smiled, and nodded. “Alright. So what are you going to fix first?”

For once in his life, Ben knew the answer to that question with absolute, blinding certainty.

It was time to get to work.

 


	11. Chapter 11

Rey drives up the coast, vaguely heading for the Canadian border. She doesn’t really have an aim for what she’ll do once she crosses, if she can cross at all, given the current lack of anything resembling a passport, but it’s a goal, and a goal is what she needs, so she keeps going. 

North doesn’t really make sense for the oncoming winter, but she likes the trees, the green of her route as it winds through federal lands and national forests. Movement is better than stagnation. Movement is what keeps her from being still enough to hear her own judgements and regrets. 

The van is ancient, but the engine is good, and she has her books, her mattress, her blankets. The nights aren’t too cold yet, and she hasn’t had any run-ins with people who have a problem with her sleeping in the back. No cops, no trouble. The cash from her till will be more than enough to cover her meager meals, and the pawn shop she finds in one of the seaside towns takes her jewelry, gives her less than what they’re worth, but Rey isn’t in a position to bargain. 

She lets the glittering reminders of her last life go, and walks out of the pawn shop with tears in her eyes that she blames on the sharp wind. They’re just things. It doesn’t matter. 

She keeps her books, though. Those, Rey can’t bring herself to part with. 

The money from the pawn shop covers groceries, and gas. Entirely too much gas, because the old van is a hog, but it’s not like she has any better options.

Hopefully, when she finds the right spot, she can park her van for a while and get back on her feet. Get back to reinventing her life, whatever it is that means anymore. 

Rey detaches. 

She doesn’t think about it, doesn’t think about Ben, or the house, or any of it at all. It’s easier to just pretend like she’s a new person every time she’s sent away. Every time something like this happens. (Even though she knows that nothing like this, nothing this wrenching and awful, has ever happened. Compared to the rest of it, loss after loss after loss, this one hurts the most—because  _ this  _ time,  _ she’s _ the one leaving,  _ she’s _ the one walking out on someone, and it’s an entirely new dimension of grief, seeing things from this side of the chasm.) 

Rey lies to herself; she pretends that there’s nothing she wants more than to forget the press of his hands on her skin, the pleading in his eyes as she’d left him. 

The last image of him, as he’d clung to the passenger-side door, begging her not to go…

None of it matters. 

What does matter is justice. Because what First Order did, what  _ Ben _ did… it might have been legal, but it wasn’t morally right. Maybe her house had been a blight on the neighborhood. And maybe it had been the last piece in a puzzle that would allow them to transform the block into their new, shiny, exclusively-priced, urban-infill development, but what they had done, and  _ how _ they had done it, it wasn’t right. Rey should’ve had a voice, but instead...

Rey mulls it over in her mind, struggling with herself, with her warring desires to run and to forget, or to stand and struggle and fight for what she deserves. Years of doing the latter, and getting kicked to the curb for it, have made her feel weary. Something keeps stopping her from making the call she knows she needs to make. 

Maybe it’s the fear of hearing Ben’s voice on the other end. Maybe it means admitting defeat, and she’s not ready. 

Maybe she’s a coward, and a fool. 

Three weeks intermittently heading north on back roads, and the weather starts to grow cold. There’s no heater in the van, not one she can run all night, anyway, and her blankets are inadequate. After one achingly cold, sleepless night, Rey splurges on hot coffee and a side of one pancake at a roadside diner, the kind that caters to long-haul truckers, with a ratty motel attached and a diesel station across the parking lot. The waitress looks at her like she knows Rey doesn’t quite belong, waits for a bigger order, waits for a better story. Rey has nothing more to give. And when Rey just thanks her and cups her hands gratefully around the thick, chipped mug of blistering hot coffee, to breathe in the warmth of it, the waitress gives her a sad sort of a look, and bustles back to the kitchen. 

Minutes later, when Rey’s order comes to the table, it’s not one pancake, but a short stack. And a plate of scrambled eggs, and bacon, and sausage, and toast, and fruit. Rey wants to weep when the waitress sets it all down, because her stomach is clawing with hunger and her pride is ground down to dust. 

“I can’t… I didn’t order…”

“You just eat, now,” the waitress says. “Don’t worry ‘bout it.”

Rey nods, and picks up her fork.

The meal is… rationally she knows it’s the furthest thing from gourmet. But the pancakes are fluffy with lacy-crisp edges, and the butter oozes down the side along with an abundance of warm maple syrup, and the bacon is thick-cut and perfect, and the eggs are airy in her mouth. It’s the best goddamn meal she’s ever had since—

After eating a quarter of it, Rey feels her stomach start to cramp, and knows she needs to stop. But the idea that all of this food will go to waste, because she’ll take in a to-go container and have no fridge to store it in, makes her want to eat as much as she can, when she can. And her body has other ideas. 

The waitress, whose name tag reads  _ Joy, _ comes back over, coffee pot in hand. 

“Everything alright?” she asks. 

And Rey nods, trying so hard to put on a brave, normal face. “Yes. Thank you. I don’t have… I can pay, I just…”

“We get short-staffed, early in the mornings,” Joy says gently, redirecting Rey from her hasty explanations. “It’s a lot for me to handle, since our last waitress quit. You think you might be looking for work?”

Rey blinks at her. “I… Sure. Okay.”

Joy smiles. The woman has to be more than twice Rey’s age, with silver-striped hair that’s betrays an undertone of a once-glossy blue-black. It’s done in two long braids. “My niece fell on some hard times, while back… you remind me of her. The men come through here, they’re mostly harmless, but some of them might… get ideas in their heads, about pretty young girls, looking hungry, like yourself. I want to give you the chance to have some honest work, if you don’t mind me being so bold.”

Understanding dawns. Rey glances around at the diner, the truckers, whose eyes look at her appraisingly under their mossy oak print caps, some of whom don’t bother to hide their leers at both of the women. Rey understands that if she needed to, she could be making money a different way. 

The thought unequivocally turns her stomach, and yet... for the other girls who’ve been down this path, the ones who are vulnerable, and alone, and desperate, Rey feels a sense of… not pity, not exactly. Understanding, maybe. Empathy. A realization that she hopes she never reaches the point where she has to make that choice. 

Most of the men here, though, are just here to eat. Tired, after being on the road for so long. 

Rey can relate to that, too. 

But at least those men have loads to haul. A reason for driving far away from everything they know and love. All of them, she presumes, want to return. But Rey has no reason at all to want to go back, nothing whatsoever waiting for her—

“I’d love a job, thank you,” she says. “I might not stay here long, but… When can I start?”

* * *

Joy speaks to the diner’s owner, a gruff, scrawny guy named Alex, who’s all bark and no bite. He looks like he fits in among the truckers, like he knows that life, but he’s sympathetic to Rey as a charity case, and Rey gets the sense that she isn’t the first pet project that Joy has brought in out of the rain.

Alex agrees to let Rey park her van out back, behind the diner, away from the parking lot, and Rey is grateful. She angles it with the back doors to the forest, to welcome as much fresh, pine-scented air as possible, and avoid the exhaust from the freeway and the smell from the discarded deep-fryer oil. 

There’s some talk that Rey will save up her under-the-table money and get a hotel room on a month-to-month, something more permanent, but Rey doesn’t want to leave the van. She uses the money to drive into the nearby town and buy some thicker quilts, some warmer socks. And Joy’s cousin, who works front desk at the motel, slips Rey a key to the hotel laundry facilities, so Rey can throw a load in every so often, get her clothes and sheets and blankets freshened up.

People are nice. 

Why does that surprise her? 

Why does it shock her that people smile when she comes into stores, people go out of their way to give her food and clothing and laughter and something, anything, to distract her from all she doesn’t have? Sure, there’s still jerks who tell her she’s ought to smile or ask if her sweet ass is on the menu, but Joy doesn’t let that slide too far, and the cook, a hilariously protective Dominican guy named Tomás, always finds a way to alter their orders with something of his own contribution if Rey so much as hints at a suggestion of mistreatment beyond a little casual banter. 

Two weeks and some change into working at the diner, and Rey realizes… maybe this is something of what family could be like. Joy, and Tomás, and Alex, who counts out her paycheck twice to make sure he hasn’t shorted her. This is nice. It feels warm, and maybe if she stayed, it could feel safe. 

It’s not much, but it’s better than starving to death, freezing to death in her car. It almost feels too good to be true. 

Rey is fully aware that her life isn’t enviable. Things are still tough. Nights are still cold. And the memories of warmth and light, the contrast of the anger and Ben’s patient, studious devotion to her pleasure… they warm her in her dreams, but flee in the lonely chill of morning. 

At some point, she’ll stop thinking about him. She has to. If she forces her subconscious to cooperate, she can drive him from her mind entirely. Blame him for everything, and make it oh so simple.

But it doesn’t work, because he’s in her, like some kind of sweet poison. Ben Solo has branded himself on her skin, and there’s no healing, no carving it away. Her goddamned irrational mind wants her to want him. It craves his comfort. His eyes, his mouth, his hands on her skin. 

She craves him. 

She craves her freedom more. And she knows, she has to believe, that she’s making the right choice.

Isn’t she? 

* * *

Eventually, though, it’s like a switch flips.

One day she’s ready, more than ready. The call she has been putting off for weeks now feels achingly overdue. 

God, she’s a moron. 

And it happens when she stops avoiding it, when it starts hanging over her head, not a sword about to fall, but a gift she can’t quite reach. She’s standing there, waiting for the rest of an order to come up at the kitchen window, listening to the music Tomás plays in the back and always sings along to, and she just knows. It’s time. 

If they drove her out, then she’s taking what’s hers. And now, she’s finally ready. 

* * *

It was pouring rain by the time she made it out to the payphone. Rey took advantage of her lunch break at the diner and gathered together a handful of change, shivering and she sprinted out to the little windowed box. Shutting the creaky door behind her, wondering how old this relic was, Rey dropped her quarters in and dialed the phone number on one of the first letters that Ben had sent her, the one that had been in her hands before they’d even met. The phone rang and rang, and she braced herself to hear his voice.

_ I can do this… I can do this... _

But when the call, at last, picked up, it was a woman’s voice. 

“First Order Property Development, Gwen Phasma speaking, how may I help you?”

“Um, yes,” Rey said, uncertain whether the feeling in her gut, the reaction to the voice that was distinctly not-Ben, was relief or sadness. “I’m calling to… arrange payment from a property buy-out? I had some questions and I didn’t know where to start.”

A pause. Then, the rustle of some papers, space being cleared on a desk, if Rey had to guess. 

“Pardon me?” the woman said at last. “I don’t think I quite follow.”

Rey cleared her throat. There was something about the woman’s clipped tone that made her feel as if she was being reprimanded for even bothering her. 

“I had a house, and the First Order folks came by and said they wanted to buy it,” Rey explained, forcing herself to slow down. “There was a letter, and then an offer in-person… I’m calling to accept the offer.”

“Can you give me the address in question, please?” the woman said. “This isn’t really my department, but I can look it up for you, if you give me your information.”

Rey told her.

More clicking of a keyboard. A long, long silence, with only the faint noise of an office in the background to provide ambience. 

Finally, the woman spoke. 

“I’m sorry, I have no record of that property ever being extended a buyout offer.”

“What?” Rey suddenly felt very small. 

“I said there’s absolutely no record of that property ever being extended a buyout offer,” the woman replied, calmly condescending. “It’s not in our files. Are you sure you have the correct address?”

“I’m...” Rey fought to stay calm, struggling for the words. “No, the address is correct. Look, my house, the property, it’s the one across from the Kylo building. It was the last holdout on the block.”

The woman sighed. “No, I’m afraid you must be mistaken. It’s... not possible for you to own that property, because it’s currently pending auction on behalf of the county. A foreclosure, due to disrepair. So If you don’t own it, then we certainly can’t pay you for it, even if it were as you say.”

“I have the deed to it, I’m sure I have all the paperwork,” Rey began, before realizing that she may very well  _ not  _ have all of it. It could be in her van, but it could’ve been left behind, too. She had been in such a hurry to leave… Rey pressed her hand to her forehead. One challenge at a time; she’ll deal with the city later… “This can’t be right. They said it would be… he said it was for… for seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars!”

The woman on the other end barely muffled her chuckle. “That’s highly unlikely for the address you’ve provided. It’s not even valued at one hundred thousand, why would someone—”

“He  _ said _ he’d—”

“With whom were you speaking?” Ms. Phasma pressed. “If it was someone from our office, he would’ve given you his card, a letter. Is it possible you were misinformed?”

“No, it’s not possible.” Rey took a breath, practically forcing the air into her panic-constricted lungs. “This is my house, the city can’t… He sent letters, more than one letter. I refused the offer initially—”

“Well, then if you refused, what’s the problem?”

“—but now I’m trying to accept it!” 

More clicking on the keyboard. Another sigh. “No, I’m sorry. There’s absolutely no record of any of that in our system. If you have a name, an agent you’ve been speaking to, perhaps I can clear up the confusion, Miss—”

Rey’s hands shook with rage as she hung up the phone. 

This woman, this… Phasma, she had to be lying. That cannot be the truth. Because if that is the truth, and Rey doesn’t own her home any more, then there’s no money at all. She had held out and fought for absolutely nothing, only to have the city come and snatch it away, leaving her… leaving her here. In a rusty phonebooth, crying and cold and desperate. 

Alone.

_ You left,  _ her thoughts reminded her.  _ You left yourself alone. That isn’t her fault, now, is it?  _

No. There was still one more call to make. Rey pulled out the folded-up bundle of papers from her back pocket. The next one, the slip from the city, has a number, too. 

She put in more change, and dialed the number. 

“Leigh County land services, this is Ari speaking, how can I help you?”

“Yes, I…” Rey managed, before the tears started to spill down her cheeks. “I’m sorry, I’m… I received a notice, code violations. I don’t know how to proceed with this, what I can do?”

“Alright ma’am, is this for a business or for a residence?”

“Residence,” Rey said. “Well, I run a business, ran a business, a store, in the first floor.”

“May I have the address, please?”

There’s no hope. Rey knows it, even as the kind-sounding woman on the other line checked and double-checked. The code violations were real, and the figure to have them fixed, Rey already knew, was astronomical. Nothing a waitress living in her van could ever hope to repay. 

“And if I can’t bring it up to code?”

“Then I’m afraid the title of property would have been reverted back to the city, and likely put to auction,” Ari said, in a tone that’s firm but sympathetic. “In fact, I see a note here that it’s already passed the response time to begin those repairs... I’m so sorry. I wish there was something I could do. If you had contacted us within the window, there might have been an option for an extension...”

But of course, she hadn’t. Pride, her damned pride, had driven her to make mistake after mistake after mistake. 

“No, it’s alright,” Rey said, shaking her head, wiping the tears from her eyes. “It’s not like it’s your fault. I… I expected it to be like this, sorry to waste your time. Thank you.”

“You have a nice day, Miss Johnson. Again, I’m very sorry.”

Rey put the phone back on the cradle.  

First Order Property Development, it seems, had no record of any offer. The county had no way of helping her. 

So her home really was gone forever, then. 

It wasn’t like she’d expected anything better, but it hurts anyway. She never should’ve expected a group like the First Order to have any sense of a moral code or ethics or anything at all. 

Hadn’t Ben proven that to be true? 

Rey bit back a sob, or maybe a scream, and slumped against the side of the phone booth, defeated. Outside, the rain was pouring down in buckets; It would only take seconds for her to get soaked, even if she ran back to the van. 

What was she doing out here? 

What has she been doing all along? Keeping herself safe—from what? Making herself happy? 

She didn’t feel happy now. Hadn’t properly been happy for weeks. As nice as Joy and everyone else were, there was an ache inside of Rey that felt like a missing limb. Like someone had come along with an ice-cream scoop and carved out all of her heart. Left it behind in her wake, standing in the street, calling to her. 

Ben. 

Why wouldn’t this feeling go away? Why won’t it stop? 

She needed him.

She missed him. 

She ached for him, more than—and this truth hit her like a bolt of lightning, swift and painful and real—more than she wants her house back. She wanted  _ him. _ Because despite it all, despite everything, the lying and the desperation and the damage, Ben Solo had been the only other person who’d been her equal, in joy and in sorrow. Ruined, yes. Morally compromised, most likely. Fucked up? As much as she was. But somehow, their broken pieces had fit together. In those brief days they’d shared, something had happened, some catalyst had changed her, transmuted her. Made her into something that could’ve been truly his, and he… he could’ve been hers. If they had been in some other world, some other time and place, maybe. Not this one. She’d run out of chances on this one. 

As if on cue, the payphone rang; at the sudden sound, Rey just about jumped out of her skin.

The phone kept ringing. Her hand hovered over it, waiting. 

She picked it up. “Hello?”

“Rey?”

It was him; it’s Ben. 

“What are you—”

“Oh thank god, you’re still… Rey, don’t hang up, please.”

“I—”

“Please just listen,” he said, the words rushing out of him like the rain around her tiny little box of solitude. “Rey, please.”

“I’m here,” she said. “I’ll stay. Ben—”

“I’m so sorry,” Ben all but sobbed the words. “About everything. About the house, about you, about this. Are you okay?

“I’m… I’m fine.”

“Where did you go?”

Rey bristled at this, instinct alone, not reason, driving her response. She looked around, through the sheet of rain, out the window of the payphone, and saw the diffused glow of the diner’s neon sign. 

“I’m safe,” she said at last. “I’m okay.”

On the other end, Ben let out a sigh of such unrestrained relief it made something wonderful and sweet twist in Rey’s gut. Why was she hiding from him? 

“How did you get this number?”

“I called back from Gwen’s desk,” he said, over the background noise on his side; he was driving, or maybe riding in a car. “She mentioned you’d called, and I—Why did you call?”

_ For you, _ Rey thought, but shook it off. 

“I left, didn’t I? I vacated the property. So I thought I’d get the money you promised.” But then Rey remembered, through the haze of sweetness that his voice has cast about her like a spell: “Ben, she had no record of the offer.”

“What?”

“She said there was nothing on record,” Rey said. “I asked her, and it was like she didn’t even know what I was—”

“Rey, tell me exactly what she said.” The sweetness of his voice had shifted, and now, there was a hint of something dark, something faintly predatory in his tone. Something dangerous, laser-focused. 

Rey shivered at this; she’d never had someone be so protective of her, so ready to fight for her. It’s humbling. 

And also kind of hot. 

“She said it was currently pending auction on behalf of the county,” Rey said. “And there was nothing in their… your files about it at all. I even said it was across from the Kylo building, but she seemed to not know what it was.”

Ben let out a curse on the other end. “That’s a lie. She knows exactly which property it is; she was there when you drove off… And if it’s not in the system, then that means she, or someone else, wiped it.”

“But why would they do that?”

“I don’t know.” Ben sighed. “Maybe to keep from paying you. If they went through the city, if they had an in, then they’d be able to scoop up any house they wanted, so long as they bought it at auction from the county.”

Rey thought back, trying to remember what she had grabbed on her way out, what she had left behind. “I still have the papers, though. And I have the offer you sent. Unless… unless you lied to me about that, too.”

“Rey,” he said, voice calm but fervent in its honesty, “I didn’t lie. I was authorized to take the offer up to that level, and you really were in the way of the block’s development, but there should be…”

His voice trailed off, and Rey didn’t know what to say. Finally, he cursed softly. “I know you don’t want to see me again. I wouldn’t blame you. But… if you have the papers, if this is what I think it is, then it’s bigger than just you. Or your house.”

“It’s not mine anymore.”

“What?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Rey said, pushing her hair off of her brow. “What do you mean, what’s going on with the papers?”

“Can I call you back at this number?” 

Rey laughed softly, bitterly, as she looked around at her little glass coffin. “It’s a payphone, so… not really, not easily.” 

“A payphone?” Ben sounded surprised. “Do they even have those anymore?”

“I’m near this… diner,” she said, then bit her tongue, avoiding any further description. “Off the freeway. I’ll look for the files, though.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Good. Will you please call me back when you find them?”

“When?” Rey said, as lightly as she could manage. “You sound pretty optimistic.”

“Rey, please. Call my direct number, this number. It goes to my cell, not to the office.”

“Okay.” Rey wrote down the number he rattled off twice, scratching her nail on a piece of carbon paper, for want of a pen or pencil. It made a childlike, but readable sequence of digits. “Got it.”

“Thank you,” he said softly. 

Rey could hear that his car had parked, there was no more road noise, wherever he was. There was so much she wanted to say, but couldn’t. So much she didn’t even understand about herself, about him, about this.

“I… I think I’m— Ben, I’m sorry about the way things ended. About driving off and leaving you there. I should’ve at least tried to hear you out.”

Ben let out a slow exhale. “I’m sorry that what I did made you feel like that was your best option. I should’ve been honest with you about that, from the start. But I… Rey, I talked to Luke.”

“You did?”

“Yeah.” There was more to it, more unspoken in his tone, but Rey didn’t press. Instead, he continued: “Do you trust me? I mean do you think you could trust me, if… if I made things right, between us? Could we start over?”

“I don’t know,” Rey said honestly. “What does that mean? How can you make things right? Can you give me my house back?”

There was a long pause, and Rey knew, then, that Ben felt as weary and broken by what had transpired between them as she did. “I can’t do that. First Order has already secured the property and… it’s already scheduled for demolition. Might even be happening as we speak, they have a way of moving quickly, when they want things out of their way. And they really wanted you out of the way.. But I… Rey, I want to show you I can change. And if you have the papers, the offer letters, then maybe I can do that.”

Rey closed her eyes. It’s gone, then. And she felt… nothing. Not for the house. But inside, a small, quiet fire had been building. Something she now was humbled to see, to recognize. 

_ Can we start over?  _

Yes. 

She could try. As terrifying as it was to even consider it. 

Her hands had always been the ones repairing, fixing, mending, making use out of trash. Could she trust his hands to do so for her heart? 

She didn’t know. 

“Okay,” she whispered. “I want to believe you. I want that so badly. But I don’t know what to do.” 

It was such a paltry handful of words for the monumental feeling inside of her. The fear of needing someone, being too needy, feeling like a frightened child, alone and unmoored. Something was telling her he was safe to trust—Ben Solo, of all people. He felt safe. After everything. Maybe the time away had softened her, or maybe she’d finally gained some perspective, Rey didn’t know. 

“I’ll make this right,” Ben said softly. “When the time comes… I’ll make it right.” 

“Okay,” Rey breathed, clutching at the receiver, seeing her warm breath as it fogged up the glass around her, turning the rain to a soft-focus haze. “Okay.”

“When you need me, I’ll be here,” Ben said softly. “Just call me, okay? Please.”

“I will,” Rey said. “Ben… Thank you.”

There was a hesitation. Something unspoken, warm and alive. Something tentative that crackled in the air between them. But neither of them said it, and Rey knew that, at least on her side, there were things she wasn’t yet ready to say to him, until she saw him, face-to-face. She wasn’t ready yet to drive back into the city; she knew that when she got there, she’d see that her home was gone. But eventually, Rey knew, as she ran back in the rain to her van, she would make the choice to see him again. 

And the tears on her face were from joy, and sadness, and a cleansing rainfall that was warm on her skin, warm, like his voice had been. Warm, like the feeling she now knew they shared, but could not yet form into words. 

_ Soon, though,  _ Rey thought.  _ Soon.  _


	12. Chapter 12

The thing about company-wide shady dealings is this: Ben knows exactly where to start looking. It just takes all of his courage—every ounce of shameful self-reflection, a full acknowledgement of his own participation—to face what he knows is waiting.

But he looks.

He looks, because he has to.

Because he owes Rey the truth, and he knows it. Whether she ever returns or not, or if she just drives away into the sunset and hates him forever, he owes her at least that much.

In the days after she leaves, Ben simply tries to process what’s happened. Everything leading up to it, all of his misguided attempts at doing what his company had demanded of him. To win, at any cost. As he filters through the remnants of her life, walking through her abandoned home and trying to understand, he feels guilt weigh on him, as if the whole house itself is sitting on his shoulders. When the days turn to weeks, and there’s no sign of her at all—when he realizes that he may never see her again, because he has no clue where she’s gone, or if she’ll come back, something starts to shift inside. Long-neglected gears, moving into place. They grind inside of him; they hurt. But they are essential. For the first time in his life, his anger is righteous, laser-focused; it’s not focused at her at all.

He goes back to work, moves back into his apartment, and he considers.

He knows what he has to do. And even if she isn’t here to see it—and, god, that thought hurts, but Ben welcomes the pain, because he knows he deserves it—he still vows to find the strength to do it.

And then, one day, he decides. He starts searching for answers, and it feels like it’s like a walk in the forest, getting his hands underneath a hunk of a rotting log, turning it,  watching the bugs scurry away from the light.

What he finds disgusts him, but it doesn’t surprise him. It’s how much he had been choosing not to see, choosing to rationalize, choosing to shift and twist and reframe, that makes the long look into he mirror of his own sins seem all the more pointed, and painful.

He knows enough, of course, not to try and center his own self-pity in the narrative that unfolds; his life has only benefited from what the company has done. But he does not allow himself the comfort of passivity; inside, Ben Solo is planning a mutiny.

It is a mutiny that, if it succeeds, will cost him his career. His entire professional reputation. Because he knows he is implicated in these things. If not directly, then indirectly.

This is not what makes him hesitate. It’s wondering what comes next? What can he do with the information he finds? First Order’s swath of change and so-called urban renewal has been championed as some of the best in the city. Attracting a new creative class at the expense of everyone else. It’s not like it’s a secret, or illegal, what they do.

Ben starts looking, however. And he begins to find traces where legality starts to blur, places where ethics and morals definitely take second place behind profit.

It’s not what they doing, it’s how, and by what methods.

Ben digs deeper.

Out scuttle the bugs.

Within a few days, Ben finds enough to implicate just about everyone whose hands had touched that property. Including, by extension, himself. But he hadn’t known…. _How_ could he not have known?

If it had been this easy to piece together the illicit puzzle of what First Order Property Development has been doing, then what does that say that nobody, not even Ben, has thought to look or even asked the questions? Questions like: Isn’t just a little bit suspicious that a former First Order employee gets elected to the planning board, later championing a seemingly-minor change to the rent control ordinances, just in time for a lucrative low-rent property to hike its rent with no warning? Isn’t it fascinating, how the residents filed their complaints with the city, but were told the new ordinance made a two-week notice legal, and a near-doubling of rent legal, too? Fascinating, how plans were in development even before the rent control ordinance change had even been proposed?

Absolutely enthralling, that he can just barely piece this together, after all of it shaking down months ago? Records are incomplete or missing in their files. Emails have been deleted, messages scrubbed. But he can see it. It’s like taking blinders off his eyes, like destroying a mask he’s worn for so long. He can see it. He sees it everywhere.

One after the other after the other, things like this, beyond lucky coincidence, fall into place. Stuck projects, suddenly becoming unstuck. Crucial evidence as to how that he happened? Minimal, or conspicuously absent.  

It wasn’t illegal, strictly speaking, for the city to change. It wasn’t illegal, to buy up old single-family residences, raze them and make something better. If people _wanted_ to sell, then where was the crime? Weren’t they making choices? Nobody had forced them—except in Rey’s case, he knows. She hadn’t wanted to sell.

They had forced her hand. He had.

But then: The call.

Gwen, gloating outside of her office. Knowing, somehow, that it had been Rey who’d called. Finding the number, racing to call her back.

Hearing her voice.

The warmth of her forgiveness, the promise of a fresh start. Phone to his ear, Ben stands in his office and stares out across the city, back to his closed door, and wishes more than anything that he could go back and make things right. Return to the first moment they’d met, when he’d walked into her shop. He might’ve just… fallen to his knees, right then, and confessed it all. Told her that she was brave, and precious, and not wrong for wanting her own life on her own terms.

He can’t do that. But he can do something.

So when the demolition begins on Rey’s block, and Rey’s building, Ben stands at the window of his penthouse apartment across the street, and he makes himself watch. If this cannot be stopped, then he will be here, standing, a silent witness to the pain he’s been at least partially responsible for.

He watches as the buildings are torn down, first the squat apartment building on the west corner, then the house he’d stayed in, then her’s...

He wonders if Rey is safe, where she is. He wonders if she knows, or can somehow feel it, as the machines tear away her frankly rickety structure—the place she had called home, faults and all. It was a genuine wonder why that place hadn’t crumpled to the ground in the slightest breeze. Maybe it had only remained standing because she’d been there to care for it. If she had loved a place like that, could she ever extend her compassion to the ruin that frames his wretched soul? Another selfish thought; he is, after all, a selfish creature.

If Rey can find the papers—she won’t bring them, he amends; she’ll probably mail them, if she can find them at all—and if those papers say what he suspects they say, then Ben can make a move.

Not before.

He’s not rushing this, even though he wants to tear up heaven and earth to find her and kiss it better.

This is bigger than him. Bigger than them both.

So Ben waits. And he searches, and he plans.

* * *

“Hello?

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Rey,” Ben said, as her voice fills the interior of his car. “Hi. You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” came her soft-spoken reply. “I just wanted to let you know, I think I found the papers you were asking for. Some of them. I don’t have the first letter. But I have the other two. Everything else that was sent.”

“That’s great,” Ben said, gripping the leather of the wheel a little tighter. “That’s… thank you.”

“But I’m…” Rey sighed on the other end of the line. “I think the van’s having some trouble. I can’t get it started, but I think there’s a garage in town, so I’ve found a guy who says he can help.”

Ben bit back the reply that formed on his lips— _who is this guy, is he safe, is he trustworthy_ —and instead, put on his turn signal, sliding over into the freeway lane to his right.

“Okay,” he said. “Do you need anything, do you want me to pay him?”

“No,” Rey laughed softly. “No. It’s alright. We’ve worked out a deal—not _that_ kind of deal—”

“I wasn’t—”

“I just wanted to clarify,” she continued over him, over his protests. “It’s a new thing I’m trying, putting everything out there, instead of bottling it all up.”

“Huh,” Ben said. But it wasn’t a disappointed noise. “Alright.”

“You should try it sometime,” Rey added, only a little playfully.

He could hear her fiddling with the cord, a faint crackle from an ancient connection that could, like all of this, like both of them, die at any minute. But it didn’t. He heard her breathing, just a little. A tiny sign of life, a little light in the distance. Something to aim towards.

“Maybe I will,” Ben said at last. “I’ve never done that while sober. It could be fun.”

“Yeah,” Rey said. “How’s that… whole thing going?”

Slowly, he came around the curve of the off-ramp, and took the next available driveway, into the parking lot of a convenience store and little strip mall. This wasn’t a conversation he was going to have at work, or anywhere near it.

Ben sighed, his eyes darting from sign to sign on the half-vacant strip mall. Nail salon. Accounting firm. Chiropractor. Liquor store.

“It’s going.”

“Oh.”

He could hear the disappointment and worry in her voice, and hastened to amend his flippant reply: “I mean… it’s okay. I’m okay. I’ve… I’m talking to someone. About that. And other things.”

“Good,” she said. “I’m glad.”

“Yeah.”

God, this was awkward. Ben wasn’t, historically speaking, super great with talking to women. Oh he could talk to colleagues just fine. It was just _this_ woman, just Rey, that made him feel especially nervous.

No, not nervous.

Vulnerable. Bared to her, completely. Like she could see through all of his masks, down to his scars. Like she saw him, truly saw him, but kept talking to him anyway.

He cleared his throat.

“But you’re okay, though? I mean, you’re… everything’s fine, over there?”

“Yes, I’m fine.”

“Good.”

Ben closed his eyes, and rubbed the heels of his palms against them. Why was this so fucking hard? What in the world did he have to lose that he hadn’t already lost—and recovered? Through some miracle not of his making. Rey had called him. And now she was calling him again, three days later. Days which had passed in anxious worry, convincing himself that she never would. If she was safe, if she was okay, then he could live with that. He’d find a way to live with the ache of not having her. Eventually. It had worked for everything else he’d lost or destroyed…

Well, no. It hadn’t.

He’d just numbed himself to that.

But: Therapy. It’s a thing. Insurance even covers it. In the week since her last call, he had started going.

“I miss you,” he finally admitted, thinking to himself: _Honesty. Honesty._ “Rey, I miss you. I wish you were here right now.”

“Are you in your car?” she asked.

“Wh—yes, why?”

“I just wanted this to be private, I mean.”

“It is.” But—the house, he thinks. She needs to know. “Rey, they—”

“I saw,” she says quietly. “The house is gone. I saw it in the news. The construction.”

“I’m sorry.” Ben closes his eyes. He tries to imagine what that must have been like for her, watching from a distance, unable to do anything.

“I know you are.”

“Rey, everything inside, I—”

“It’s over,” she says, brusquely. “It’s done. Things break and sometimes you can’t repair them. I know that more than most.”

“But some things you can repair,” Ben says. _Like me, he thinks. Use your deft and careful hands, and put me back together. And I will use mine, and do the same for you. I’ll hold you together, if you’ll let me. I’ll risk it all._

She laughs, softly, on the other end of the line. “Yes. Some things… there’s still life left in them.”

“What do you— what do we have to do?” Ben asks her. “What can I do? I’m already doing what I can, I just need—”

“Ben, I’ve never felt for anyone the way I feel for you,” Rey sighs. “Sometimes, I wish I could stop feeling for you, but I can’t. I don’t even want to, really. I just… I remember when you first came to the shop,” she said. “To my shop, I mean. You parked out front, and I looked at your car and I thought, ‘God, only a real asshole drives a car like that.’”

At this, Ben laughed. He could feel the way his mouth moved, an unfamiliar but not entirely unpleasant feeling, smiling. “Really?”

“Yes,” Rey said. “I hated you, before you’d even walked in. Or at least, I was ready to hate you.”

“And that’s how you answer, when I tell you I miss you?” he asked, half-teasing, half-vulnerable. “When I say I wish you were here?”

“Ben,” she admonished; he could hear the smile in her voice. “You didn’t let me finish.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m an asshole in an asshole car, and I beg your forgiveness—”

“ _Ben_ ,” Rey repeated. “The point is… I hated you, before I knew you. And then I _thought_ I knew you, and I liked you even less. But—”

“You’re really not good at flirting, Rey.”

“Will you shut the hell up?” Rey grinned; he could hear it in her voice. “I’m saying I know you better, now. The real you. Not the man in the suit who has to prove something. You have a heart, Ben Solo. Even if you want to pretend you don’t. And I do wish you were here.”

“What if I have to drive there in my asshole car?”

Rey made a noise that was the audible equivalent of rolling her eyes. “You don’t know where I am, Ben.”

He made a noncommittal noise, a huff of laughter, perhaps.

“You don’t,” Rey said, decisively. Like she needed to believe it as well as him. “Anyway. I wanted to let you know. The papers. I can… mail them to you. If that works for you.”

“Or I could come get them.”

“ _Ben._ ”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “Sorry.”

Rey paused. Let out a sigh. “So it’s gone, then. The house. Everything.”

Ben pressed his mouth together, and swallowed thickly. “Yes. But—“

“I have to get back to work,” Rey said, hastily, her voice thick with emotion. “I’ll… call you soon.”

Then Ben had managed an “I’m sorry,” when what he’d really wanted to say was, “I love you,” which wouldn’t have kept her on the line anyway.

Slowly, he pushed at the _end call_ button on his phone, then lifted his hands to rub them at his face.

Love. What does that word even mean? Is it the gnawing guilt in his gut that grows as he builds his case, the faint anxiety as he secrets it out on thumb drives at work? No. Love is a lens which focuses his anguish, drives him to do the right thing, the difficult thing. His only model for a long-term relationship had been the trash fire of his parents’ flawed marriage. Contentious, always concerned about the optics, the perception, not the reality.

Ben was so, so sick of caring about how he, or Rey, are perceived. He’s so tired of being unhappy. If he has to go through hell to ensure that she knows he’s a man of his word, then he’ll drive his asshole car straight for the hottest part of it.

* * *

A few days later, her papers arrive in the mail, at his apartment. He reads them, and very nearly calls in to quit on the spot.

It’s exactly what he expected; now, he has everything he needs—except her.

Rey calls back two days later, catches him just before he’s about to leave for work. She asks him if he got the papers, and he tells her yes, and thank you.

She calls him again, the day after that.

“I had a really frustrating day at the diner,” she says. “Can I talk to you about it?”

“Please,” he says.

She vents to him, about truckers and paychecks and the laundry facilities at the nearby hotel chewing up one of her blankets. And Ben, sitting in his very nice glass-walled office, listening to her frustration, very quietly adds two of the nicest, thick down comforters to his cart, grateful for Amazon Prime.

He can add those to the stack of other things he’s bought.

She calls the next day, and then the next. It’s easier to say all the things he couldn’t, when he had her in his arms. She doesn’t ask about the progress of his investigation, and he doesn’t volunteer anything more than a thank-you for sending the paperwork. It’s almost like they’ve agreed to pretend this is a normal, long-distance relationship. It’s oddly wonderful, just a different kind of lie, but one that allows them to share and open and be vulnerable.

One day, when she calls, he makes a note of the number, and does a little investigation afterwards. There’s no easy way to find the physical location of a phonebooth, not without pulling some strings with the phone company, and Ben doesn’t want to be completely underhanded. It’s a last resort, he thinks. Just in case…

She calls him again, and he takes it in his car on the way out to a lunch meeting that she’s now completely distracted him from. It’s been a week since her first call, but he can tell that she isn’t just giving him courtesy calls. She isn’t just being polite.

* * *

“I was cold, all night,” she said. “Without you.”

“Did you… get warmed up?” Ben asked, fumbling for the right way to answer her, wanting to be careful, so careful, that he does this right, this time. Because he’s so fucking lucky to have a this time.

He’s lucky for any amount of time she grants him. Any moments, where she finally lets him in.

“Yes,” Rey said, with a hushed feeling of excitement passing between them. “I did. I… thought about you, and… it warmed me up.”

Shit.

“Tell me.”

Ben Solo is sitting in his car, parked in front of a sushi place and a gym lit by orange lighting, and he’s absolutely positive he can’t whip his dick out. But it twitched to life behind the barrier of jersey and wool gabardine suiting fabric all the same.

_I thought about you..._

“I… touched myself,” Rey confessed. “I thought of… you, your hands, that night—”

“Fuck,” Ben exhaled the word shakily, grinding his hand down on his steadily-growing erection. “You can’t tell me that and then not let me come to you.”

“I’ve almost told you where I am a thousand times,” Rey admitted, her pay phone cord crackling. “But—Ben, what are we doing?”

“What?” His hand is still pressed on his dick, but he stilled it, guiltily. “What do you mean?”

“This, I mean.”

“We’re on the phone,” he couldn’t help but snark back—the gift from his father, and he knew it, that snark. “It’s a communication device—”

“Are we… what is this, exactly?”Rey said.

Slowly, he moved his hand away from his dick. “What do you want it to be?”

“Because it feels like… it feels like we’ve skipped ahead, somehow. We didn’t exactly start off like normal people do. Dating and all of that. But it still feels like… like you’re a part of me, and I… it scares me, a little,” Rey exhaled, then took a breath. “Okay, more than a little. It scares me a lot. I’ve never needed someone the way I need you. Does that make me stupid?”

“No, of course it doesn’t—”

“Because I think maybe it does.”

“It doesn’t. I feel that way too,” he said, with raw and utter honesty. “And I don’t have a fucking clue either. But I’m… if I can make this right, then we can maybe have a chance. RIght?”

“Yes,” Rey said. “I want that.”

“You want all that dating shit?” Ben said, a teasing and playful tone draped across his still-honest and undeniable need. “I’ll bring you some flowers and… fucking chocolates. We can go see a movie. I won’t even feel you up, unless you ask me very nicely. I’ll pay for dinner.”

_“Ben.”_

“I’ll keep you warm,” he vowed. “Every night. As often as you want. I’ll get on my knees for you and make you come with just my mouth—would you like that?”

“Fuck,” Rey muttered. “That’s not fair. You can’t say that and—I’m in a phone booth, I can’t—”

“Yeah?” Ben challenged. “What can’t you do, sweetheart?”

“You know what I mean,” she lobbed back. And then, her voice softened. Almost to a whisper: “Why do I need you so badly?”

* * *

It’s a question even he can’t answer. There is no rational reason for anything these days. With Rey, the illusion that he’d had a rational path in the first place seems to have crumbled, melted away like a cheap popsicle left on the sidewalk in the heat of summertime. She pierces him, and he bears it, because the pain of it cleanses him somehow.

He has almost everything he needs.

He has the files, saved and secured at his apartment, in backup drives that no one will ever find.

He’s got the number of the press contact who had been looking into one of the former building sites, but had come up empty-handed. All he has to do is make the call.

But in the end, it’s not the data, or the demolition, or the reporter who lights the fuse.

It’s the storm.

* * *

“They said it’s going to be a bad one,” Rey said, and he can hear her fiddling with the phone’s ancient cord again, crackling and cutting out her words intermittently. “—could stay in the hotel, but—creepy—don’t want you to worry—fine, in the van.”

“Rey?” Ben pressed the cell phone to his ear, standing and walking to the window of his office, as if that would somehow fix the signal. “Rey, you’re breaking up.”

“I think it’s the phone,” came Rey’s staticky reply. “It’s just a bit of rain, though—sure it will be fine.”

“You don’t have to—” Ben couldn’t even get the sentence out, before the sound of the dial tone cut him off.

He held the cell phone to his ear, feeling something like a storm washing over him. Cold fear, panic, anger, worry, all swirling into a churning mess somewhere in the center of his chest. With one push of a button, Ben tried to call the last number back—but it went immediately to a message: _‘This call could not be completed as dialed. Please hang up and try your call again.’_

Ben went back to his desk, pulling up a browser window and double-checking the National Weather Service website. He saw the Severe Weather alert banner pop up even at the state level. A massive storm front, heading for the coast. He scanned the page, committing the details to memory, instantly deciding—then, without another thought, grabbed his keys, and his jacket, and left.

“Family emergency,” Ben said to the woman who sat up front, in the lobby of their offices. “I’m going to be out… for a while. Let everyone know, would you?”

If Ben had looked back over his shoulder, he would've seen the red-haired woman put down her game of Candy Crush and give him an incredulous expression. 

Instead, he just heard her reply: “I—okay…?”

He didn't look back. Ben was already at the elevators. He jabbed at the button, hard enough to nearly crack it. Now, he was ready. The storm was heading for land in more ways than one.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Monumental thank-yous to Destinies and Voicedimplosives for their support, hand-holding, and encouragement. I literally could not have done it without you two. Thank you. ETA - Thank you SO MUCH to George (@benbegginsolo on twitter) for the beautiful moodboard!

Outside, the storm raged. Howling, angry wind buffeted the Falcon’s thin metal walls, throwing rain and hail against the van with all the subtlety of an alleyway knife fight. At times, the whole van shook from the force of the wind. It was as if a crowd had surrounded her, throwing handfuls of nails and bolts at the vehicle. In the distance, thunder rolled; it seemed to grow closer with each peal.

Inside, Rey shivered under her paltry blankets—including the one that the hotel’s decrepit washing machine had practically eaten—wishing it would just stop.

Each time the storm slammed against the side of the van, the small puddle of water growing in the well behind the passenger seat filled a little more... but… Rey could just shove the ripped part of her blanket against it, and it would be fine. She’d fix it, when the storm passed. She could fix this.

But right now, she was freezing, and that was a fact that she couldn’t deny. Even after piling on two layers of socks and tucking her hands under her blankets, her body ached with cold. Her toes cramped when she curled them, numb and painful.

Rey buried her face in her blankets. She _wasn’t_ crying. She wasn’t going to allow herself to feel anything. Rain was just water, and so were tears. It would all dry, in time. The storm would pass, and then she’d keep going. That’s how it always had been, and that’s how it was going to be.

She would be alright, after this. She would find a way, find _something…_

Rey shivered. The thought of getting out of her freezing van, sprinting across the parking lot, and begging whoever was at the front desk for a room didn’t seem so gut-wrenchingly awful and humbling, now that her fingers were blue. Even if they didn’t have a room available, Rey could just sit in the lobby and warm up. Surely they would allow it—

Assuming anyone was still there.

Rey felt that realization sink in her gut like a stone.

They might not be there at all. The diner had been closed earlier in the day, and everyone else had gone home already. No trucks were parked in the overflow lot across the way; everyone sensible had left in advance of the storm, or gone to shelter in place. Joy had asked her, at least four times, whether she was really going to be alright…

_“You can spend the night with me, it’s no trouble,” she’d said, her features creasing into a worried frown as she’d looked the still too-thin Rey up and down. “You just say the word.”_

_“I’ll be fine,” Rey had replied, wrapping her hands around the to-go paper cup of hot coffee, still scalding from the pot. “Really. That van could probably survive a hurricane.”_

Now, the memories of hot coffee and warm food were stuck in the wistful corner of her mind; Rey pulled the blanket cocoon up around her shoulders, and closed her eyes.

This would pass. Like everything that had come before, the storm would pass. She’d—she’d call Ben from some other phone, a working one. She’d tell him she was okay, and live off of that warmth for another few hours.

The sweet warmth of his voice. The memories of his touch and his tender care.

Clumsy though their beginnings had been—alright, more than clumsy, more like contentious—Rey had come to miss their daily calls. He’d been a constant, in a way that nobody had ever been for her. Her defenses had formed a construct, a scaffolding. It had held her up, until it had been gone. Without it, she had crumpled like sodden cardboard in a rainstorm.

She burrowed uselessly into the blankets, accepting her own stupidity and resolving that once she was warm—just a few moments more—then she’d go to the hotel. Take her chances. Beg for pity.

Rey wiped at her tears, and rubbed her hands together in a futile attempt at warming them.

It didn’t work.

What she had said, that day on the phone with him, it had been the truth. She had touched herself, brought herself off and thought of him, and their time together. She’d allowed herself that much—but the pleasure had faded, in the end. That delicate afterglow had only been temporary. What little warmth she had gained from it, what little satisfaction, had fled almost instantly.

Because he hadn’t been there, beside her.

Because she’d left.

Yes, she’d left because of what he’d done, and what he’d failed to do, but—it gutted her, the realization that she’d done the very same thing to him that she’d always hated experiencing herself. Walking away like a coward instead of staying, and facing what had happened, and taking ownership.

_What am I doing here?_

Outside, the hail and the thunder and the wind rose into a cacophony.

Rey covered her ears.

“Stop,” she whispered, even knowing it was useless. “Stop, please, stop.”

There were dark memories associated with this much noise. Ones that arose, unbidden and distinctly unwanted: tires screeching, the rattle of an ancient engine. Yelling, raised voices. Dozens of awful sounds, from countless half-forgotten memories.

These were old memories. Ones she’d hoped to never remember.

“Stop,” Rey pled again.

Without warning, a sudden rapid knock sounded against the van’s back door. A heavy tattoo which had not come from the storm.

Rey jumped, her eyes going wide.

“Who’s there?”

She called out almost on instinct, her rational thoughts following behind, knowing that the sound of the storm would make her voice basically impossible to hear.

 _It’s Joy,_ came her next thoughts. _Joy must’ve felt bad for me, came back to offer me a ride home…_

Gratitude and shame filled her.

_Or it’s someone who’s investigating why I’ve been sleeping in a van in a parking lot for so long…_

The knock sounded again.

Rey peeled back the layers of her blankets, and reached for the door. She put her shaking hand on the freezing cold metal handle, and pushed it down. The lock creaked, metal vibrating under her touch. And then, with a gust of bracingly cold wind, the back door swung open. Rain blew stinging pellets of hail inside almost instantly—a swirl of ice, mostly blocked by a solid, broad, tall male body.

_Ben._

Rey stared at him. Her throat seemed to be closed up all of a sudden. Choked by emotion, and by disbelief.

“Can I come in, please?” he had to practically shout, to be heard over the storm. But it was him—Ben, he’d come for her, he’d found her, he—

“What are you—” Rey hastily amended her questions, realizing that he was still standing in the blustery hailstorm, a massive bundle under his arm. “Yes, yes.”

Ben didn’t need to be told twice.

He scrambled inside, and Rey maneuvered around him, slamming the door shut behind him and securing it. All of a sudden her little, frozen cave of bundled misery seemed so much smaller and cozier with the addition of a tall, steaming male body. And he literally _was_ steaming—a soft mist rising from his sodden, lovely suit.

“Y-your suit—”

“Fuck the suit,” Ben said, with a vehemence that both frightened and aroused her. “Are you okay? Shit, I can’t believe I—your hands, they’re—”

“I’m f-fine,” Rey said. “Why—how did—”

“I drove up and down the coast.” Ben put the bundle down beside him—Rey saw that it was something massive, wrapped in a black garbage bag, but was too distracted by his presence to guess at what it might contain—and was tugging off his suit jacket. “I was the only one on the freeway, heading straight into the storm.”

“You c-came for me—”

“I’m wet, I need to get these off and then you need to get warmed up,” Ben said.

When Rey looked up at him, she saw that his brows were drawn together in worry. He was worried for _her_ , Rey realized, somewhat dumbly. He was scared. Terrified. And yet… Rey couldn’t feel a thing. It was as if her brain was sluggish, all of a sudden.

She was so _tired._

“Rey, get under the blankets,” Ben said. “Get your clothes off, I don’t want to get you wet—”

“I missed you, too,” she said, smiling back at him drowsily.

He didn’t smile. “Get under the blankets, please. Let me take care of you.”

Rey stared at him a moment longer, and then slowly nodded.

It was ice-cold in the van when she pulled off her sweater and shirt and tank-top. Her nipples pebbled in the cold, swiftly and almost painfully tight; Ben glanced at them, but his gaze did not linger. His hands flexed, as if he yearned to touch her there, touch her everywhere, but instead, he reached for his tie, and tugged it off. Then, the shirt.

“Under the blankets, Rey," he said, voice low and quiet, a rumble in the thunderous storm that surrounded them. "Please. You have your mattress in here, yeah?”

Rey nodded. She obeyed, slipping under the inadequate quilts, her eyes wide as saucers as she stared at his bare, muscular chest. Was it her imagination, or had he become wider since she’d last seen him?

“Good.” He seemed to say it more to himself than to her. With his own shirt off, Ben frowned down at her blankets, then tugged at the bag he’d brought inside, peeling back the wet garbage bags and carefully wadding them up so the rain that still clung to the plastic didn’t shower over both of them. “Let me just flip these, though…”

“What?” Rey asked, feeling even more detached and distracted—but even she could tell her reactions weren’t just from seeing Ben Solo’s beautiful bare chest. She was _too_ tired.

Ben yanked the covers off of her; Rey shrieked. What was he—?

“I’m sorry,” he said—then softly, a new blanket was draped across her shivering form, thick and lofty and heavy with what felt like real feathers.

She closed her eyes, and luxuriated in it. It wasn’t cozy yet, but the soft fabric was like being wrapped in a cloud. The second blanket settled on top of the first, and then, Ben must have draped her denser, older blankets atop the whole pile.

“To keep the heat in,” he explained.

Rey opened her eyes, hearing the fear and worry still present in his voice, and the plastic crackle of something being opened.

“Take these,” Ben said, and pushed a soft little square of… something, into her hands. “Hold onto them.”

Rey’s fingers curled around whatever it was he had given her, muttering about how she’d much rather hold onto _him…_ then, she shuddered at the sudden warmth that rushed into her achingly cold hands.

Some kind of warming packet, Rey thought. But before she could ask, or examine them, Ben was speaking again.

“Have you eaten?”

Rey shook her head. “I—I just need you.”

Ben looked down at her. He was sitting on his knees, top of his windblown, wet hair just brushing the roof of the van. He seemed to realize he was still shirtless, and, slowly, he set the box of granola bars in his hand back down on the floor.

“Please,” Rey whispered.

Ben nodded. Then, with a quick little burst of cold beneath her blanket pile, he moved beneath them, and gathered her up against his warm, solid frame.

It felt… it felt good.

It felt wonderful.

And Rey could no longer keep the tears inside.

“You came,” was all that she could manage to say, crushed against his chest by his burly arms. “You came for me…”

“Well, you didn’t exactly make it easy,” Ben replied, low and sweet and sardonic. He pressed a kiss to the top of her hair, and held her closer, as if he could imbue his warmth into her body. “You could’ve just told me where you were…”

At this, Rey sobbed harder.

Ben held her. “I’m sorry, I…”

“No, no, I’m sorry,” Rey said, talking across him and mostly to his bare chest, hoping he could hear her anyway. “I’m so sorry.”

The storm was still loud outside, but Rey pressed the side of her face to his heart, listening to the steady beat of it. She took another slow, shuddering breath, letting the sound of it, the feel of him, steady and calm her. For a moment, the world outside grew quiet and distant. There was peace here, at long last. Peace, and understanding, and the feeling of coming home.

“I thought you might… be angry, if I tried to find you,” Ben confessed, after a few slow, lazy moments had passed. “But I figured I should risk it anyway.”

“What?” Rey shook her head as best she could while still cuddled up close to his body. “No, no, I’m so glad you’re here, I… how did you find me?”

Ben laughed softly. “The postal code on your letters. And then I looked at the forecast and figured, well, if there’s any irony in the world, you’re probably suck right in the worst of it. So that’s where I started… and there you were...”

Rey felt a slide of warmth trail down her back: his hands, she realized, letting her eyes fall closed once more. Paradoxically, the warmth of him made her shiver. Impossibly, he held her closer, hands slipping to the edge of her waistband, just below the dip of her lower back. But no lower.

“And then I drove,” he whispered. “I drove, and I stopped at every place that looked like a diner, next to a hotel that I wouldn’t want you to sleep in. I looked for you. And I found you.”

“Yes,” Rey said, somewhat nonsensically, but… sense doesn’t much matter anymore. Not when there was touch, and warmth, and contact. Not when there’s Ben.

 _He brought her blankets,_ she thought. _And food, and… he’s here._

“No-one’s ever… come back for me,” Rey admitted, feeling childish and foolish and pathetic for admitting it. Her eyes were closed, cheek pressed against his bare chest, breathing in the scent of him. Cedar and pine and a spice that reminded her of incense. One of his hands stayed down low, palm steady on the curve of her lower back, while the other moved up to cradle the back of her head.

“Tell me,” he whispered.

So she took a breath, and she did.

Rey told him about her earliest memories. About the cold, about being left alone in the rundown house. About how, after three days and three lonely nights, she’d tried to climb up the shelves in the empty pantry, looking for the bottle she knew was kept up on the top shelf. Looking for something, anything to eat.

Then, she’d slipped, and she’d fallen.

It had been her screams which had brought the neighbors. She’d only been four, so far as anyone could discern. She’d had no doctor’s visits, no dental records, no school registration, no social services... A home-birth, that’s what they had said had been most likely; no birth certificate on record, no way of tracking down wherever her parents had gone.

And she’d been alone.

The memories, the truth of it, it poured out of her; poison being drawn from a wound.

Being taken into state custody, being shuffled from place to place. Some had been kind. Others, not so much. But nothing had ever been home, because Rey… she didn’t even know what that word meant.

Ben tilted his face down, and nuzzled at her hair with the tip of his nose, murmuring soft reassurances, endearments, encouragements.

Nobody had ever come back for her; that wasn’t hyperbole. Rey had spent her whole life fighting so fiercely, simply to live.

“I’m sorry,” Ben said. “I’m so sorry. I can’t—”

“You didn’t know.”

“That doesn’t matter.” His tone was resolute.

Rey sighed. “Ben… you don’t have to fix me… I know it’s not my job to… to fix you.”

Slowly, lovingly, he traced from her neck to her spine once more, then back up, the silence stretching on between them as the rain battered the van.

When she paused, and looked up into his eyes, they were wet.

“I know,” he said. “I… I knew that from the start. You were so fierce and so… strong. I think I loved your strength from the beginning.”

Rey sobbed softly, and pushed her face into his chest.

“Your fire,” Ben said softly. “I wanted that. I wanted to see you—you’re so fucking stubborn, Rey.”

She let out a wet laugh. He’d said the words endearingly, almost with an awestruck tone.

“But I wouldn’t have you any other way. That stubbornness… it’s how you survived. And christ, I’m glad you survived.”

There was nothing she could say; all of Rey’s insides seemed to have been mysteriously replaced with warm, slow-moving, languid heat. And Rey knew, she didn’t have to explain herself anymore. Not with him.

“Even if it was difficult… even if you’re…” he sighed. “Rey, I’m not a good man. What I’ve done… what I’ve helped others do, it’s not the sort of thing that can be fixed with a few quilts. But… I think what I’ve started to do, it might go a way towards helping. Making sure that people like you don’t get hurt again.”

“The quilts are helping,” Rey murmured, sleepily. She felt a good kind of lazy sleep wash over her. “Will you stay? If I sleep, will you—”

“Yes, Rey,” Ben said, before pressing a kiss to the top of her hair, and holding her tightly to his warm, radiant body. “Yes, I’ll stay.”

* * *

She was rocking, adrift on a gentle ocean. The waves sprayed icy water in her face, but—Rey clung to the softness that enveloped her, content and safe.

It was dark. Nighttime, on a storm-tossed sea.

Rey smiled, though she didn’t know why, and held on.

The spray ceased. She curled up on a smooth, warm… something… whimpering softly. This feeling wasn’t the same as the warmth which had carried her. Delirious, yet conscious enough to be distressed, Rey sought out that lovely, familiar heat once more; it found her, a hand holding her own, as the storm softened into a purr around her.

The storm—no, an ocean?

“It’s okay,” a low voice said; the touch squeezed her hand. “Rey, stay awake, okay?”

The ocean was… talking to her. That was nice of it. A very nice ocean.

Rey dozed.

When she woke next, she was being rocked again, carried in someone’s arms. Then, her body slid between soft, cloud-like sheets. Then, warmth once more, behind her back, cradling her.

Pieces of time seemed to be missing, between those moments. But she was safe, that much her body seemed to know.

That body was a strange fire, slow-moving and distant from her mind. She shivered, anchored by faceless touch. Each time she would surface, there would be a new, strange sensation, one that her rational mind tried to identify, and only sometimes succeeded: The rasp of a cat’s tongue across her bare chest and shoulders, cooling the fire in her veins—no, a cloth, it was a damp cloth. A soft, low voice in her ear, saying her name, but the rest was whispers in the wind. She was so tired; it felt as if she had slept for centuries.

When the fever broke at last, Rey opened her puffy, tired eyes and looked over at the glowing shapes on a nearby table. It took several long minutes to identify them, what they meant, but when her mind woke up a little further she realized it was a clock. It was 4:28 am; Rey let that fact wash over her, the rest of her thoughts becoming aware of the steady rhythm of breath, inhale and exhale, which was not her own, here in the dark, otherwise quiet room.

Ben.

Ben’s room.

Rey moved as if to sit up, and felt his arm banded across her waist.

She turned, half propped up on one elbow, half reclining, and looked down at him.

Even in the darkness, Rey could tell that Ben… he looked like shit.

_How long have I been asleep?_

It was—she checked the clock again—4:31 in the morning, judging by the predawn darkness that filtered in through the gap in the drapes. Her bladder pressed urgently into her awareness, and Rey carefully moved Ben’s solid, bare, surprisingly heavy arm off of her body. He had to have a bathroom in this place, right?

A few shaky moments later, Rey had managed to get to her feet. As she stood, she realized she was wearing underwear and nothing else. And just the act of standing made her head spin dangerously.

Okay.

She could do this.

She—she was sitting back down on the edge of the bed, vision swimming.

“Rey?”

Ben’s sleep-roughened voice called to her, and she felt a hand moving across the bed sheets, patting them as if to try and find her.

“Rey, what—”

“I need to… go to the bathroom.”

“Let me help you,” he said, moving to sit beside her on the bed, his arm wrapping around her back.

 _You don’t have to do it alone,_ Rey thought, and gratitude spilled over within her like wine from and overflowing glass. _Let him, he’s here, let him…_

“Okay,” she said, and nodded.

He did.

And Rey felt… humbled, at the way he half walked, half carried her to the bathroom. She felt humbled as he helped her take her underwear off, a gesture which was not sexual in the slightest, but simple, kind. She had never just… been near someone, like this, in such a painfully vulnerable state.

It was intimate.

It was everything.

“It’s okay,” she said, when he reached down to pick up her discarded underwear. “I know you don’t— you won’t…”

Ben, who was standing before her in his bathroom wearing only a pair of loose, dark-colored pajama pants, nodded. Of course he wouldn’t ask that of her. And what did that say about her, that she felt as if she needed to apologize for it in the first place. Ben reached out for her, his hand on her bare shoulder. She could see it, the movement, in the dim light of a nearby nightlight. She could make out the shape of his face, the line of his profile. His nose.

She was going to start crying about a _nose._

“Come back to bed,” Ben said. “I’ll get you something to eat.”

“I’m not—” Rey started to say, purely out of habit, but her stomach gave a loud growl. She nodded. “Okay. I’d… like that.”

He tucked her back into bed, then—his bed—and brought over a cup with a straw, and held it to her mouth as he helped her sit up. Strawberry vanilla, Rey thought; a smoothie, or a protein shake. Either way, it didn’t matter; It tasted like the best food she’d ever had.

But after a few sips, she was tired again.

“Sleep,” he said, taking the straw and the bottle from her lips. “I’ll run this back to the fridge, and then I’ll come back.”

Rey nodded. She didn’t doubt him—the coming back, as he’d promised.

She didn’t doubt. She never would doubt him again.

And so, with her face pressed against a soft pillow, resting on a mattress which felt like a cloud, Rey dozed. And when Ben came back, she felt him take her into his arms, press a kiss to the back of her neck, where her hair had fallen away.

She slept.

* * *

“How long was I out?” Rey asked him, laying on her side in his bed, as lazy afternoon light streamed in through the curtains. She was still exhausted, even though she had slept for several more hours. But at least now she felt closer to human. A wrung-out, tired, and faintly sick human, but human.

Now that she was awake, however, she could take a proper look around the room—Ben's apartment, as spare and modern and minimalist as a rented bachelor's flat. Cool gray walls and simple, chrome-accented furniture; no artwork, no color, no personality, nothing to mark it as a place where a human being lived. It looked clean, and subdued, but lonely. Outside the bedroom door, she could see a kitchen and dining table. The wall opposite the bathroom appeared to be floor-to-ceiling windows, but there were heavy dark gray velvet drapes pulled across them, concealing from view the place from which Rey had fled. 

She wasn't ready to look down and see the lot. Not quite yet. 

And especially not when Ben was standing there, towel-drying his hair, fresh from the shower. That was, all things considered, a much more appealing sight. 

“You passed out in my arms, back in the van,” Ben answered. He was wearing just the pair of low-slung loose pajamas again, bare torso distractingly on display. “Then, I thought you were warming up... You had a fever. So I carried you to my car—”

“I remember,” Rey said, rolling onto her back, grateful for every movement that wasn’t sluggish or filled with teeth-chattering cold. “Well, a little.”

“I figured it would be okay if I took you somewhere, so long as I kept my promise.”

Rey looked at him, feeling her cheeks flush at the memory of how needy and pathetic she’d been, asking him not to leave her… begging him, like a child, a pathetic child—

“Rey, listen to me.” Ben sat down on the edge of the bed beside her, his expression growing serious. “I’ll have the van towed back, I promise—”

“I don’t care about the van,” Rey said, covering her suddenly wet eyes with her hand. “I… I mean, that would be nice of you, but I—Ben, I can’t… I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, when you… when you’re so good to me.”

“You better get used to it.” She could hear the amusement in his voice, such a warm contrast to everything she had known him to be, before… and as she felt the mattress move a little, his hand encircled her wrist, gently moving her hand away from her eyes.

“I don’t know how I—”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No, listen. You’ve woken me up, Rey. You’ve shown me I could be… a different person, a good person. That all the things I’d done in the past could be… I could do something different, I could start any time... And now, because I love you, I get to take care of you, and you don’t have to be afraid, or ashamed, ever again.”

His words, deliberate and sure, filled her body with an indescribable emotion.

“Say it again,” Rey whispered.

Ben smiled gently, leaning closer. “Which part?”

“You know which part—”

“Say it.” His eyes, still loving, still warm, held hers. But there was a seriousness to his expression, a devotion in his gaze. “Rey, I want you to say it. When you need something, ask me. Don’t hide from this… from me.”

“Tell me you love me,” Rey said, as soft as his caress on her skin.

“I love you.”

His reply was instant, sure, and steady; Rey saw the truth of it in his eyes.

“Say it again, Ben, please.”

“I love you,” he said, leaning over her, kissing the center of her chest, right at the valley of her breasts. Right over her heart. “I love you—and I have one more thing I need to do.”

“Is it _me_?” Rey asked, squirming a little bit beneath him, a feeble attempt at seduction that was somewhat stilted by her recent feverish state.

“No,” Ben laughed, and pressed one more kiss to her skin. “Not yet.”

A ‘not yet’ was as good as a ‘soon,’ Rey reasoned; she smiled, and petted at his hair as he looked up at her. He looked tired, that much was undeniable. But there was a peace in his eyes, a surety that was new and truly wonderful to see. They both were tired, and Rey was still definitely recovering. But she felt… content.

“Can you do it from right here?” Rey said, patting the bed beside her with her free hand

Ben laughed softly. “Yes. I can. But I need to get dressed first. Do you want to shower?”

“What exactly are you implying?” Rey teased, her grin widening.

Ben planted his face back down to her skin, nuzzling unashamedly at her. Rey laughed at the gesture, such a playful, ridiculous thing in light of everything that had brought them to this moment. He breathed in, as if to sniff at her, which only made her laugh more.

“I’m saying… do you want to take a shower with me?” Ben asked, when they’d both stopped laughing, finding themselves laying side-by-side on his massive bed.

“Yes,” Rey said. “I would like that very much.”

* * *

Ben helped her up to shower, washing her skin as if she was a piece of fine porcelain, driving her wild by not touching her at all the way she craved him to touch…

 _Soon,_ he’d said— _when you’re well, I promise._

And he’d sealed that vow with a searing-hot kiss which had left her breathless.

Well, that, and the effort it had taken her sick frame to make it through the shower and back to bed. But he made her heart feel warm and soft and safe, and Rey reveled in the feeling, knowing that she didn’t have to cling to it any longer. Didn’t have to hold it close, ration it out like scraps under the table. She could hold it gently, this delicate feeling.

Love had made her poetic. Who would’ve thought?

He’d tucked her back into his bed, and Rey watched as he got dressed. It looked a bit silly, him wearing a dress shirt with a sweater over it, paired with what must be his favorite pair of pajama pants, but then he got out his laptop.

He seemed to be readying himself for something.

Rey, at last, caught his gaze. “What is it?”

“I…” Ben looked to the right, to where the windows of his apartment were still half-concealing the lot down below which had once held her home. “I made contact with a reporter, about what I found.”

“What?”

“I’m telling them everything,” he said, looking back at her, his laptop still tucked up under his arm. “I have to. I want to—”

“But there’s… surely you must’ve signed some sort of—”

“Whistleblower laws,” Ben said, with a shrug that was only a shade too casual to be completely free of nerves. “And… it’s worth it, they can try whatever they want. I know this means I’ll..I have to do this.”

Rey looked into his eyes. She nodded, once, and then gave him a steady, close-mouthed smile. “Okay.”

* * *

Rey held his hand, careful to keep out of sight of the video call. Tucked in beside him, she quietly lent him her reassurance, her strength, as Ben told the reporter everything.

This was the end of his career.

They both seemed to understand this, and yet Rey marveled at his openness with the reporter, his willingness to reveal all of the documents he’d secreted out of there. He was so casual about what amounted to… career suicide. Because there would be no takedown of First Order without Ben as one of the casualties. And he wasn’t even trying to get out of harm’s way.

Rey listened quietly as he spoke, explaining the lies and deceptions of First Order. There was just so much—so many people who had been hurt, so many communities which had been damaged. Corruption at so many levels. Bribes and illegally-obtained documents. Payoffs and financial schemes.

Rey closed her eyes.

How strange it was, that after all of her struggling and all of her running, she’d found this peace in the midst of chaos. How amazing, that he was willing—eager, even—to take an axe to his professional career, simply because she had been there to tell him no. No one had ever done that for her. All of her life, she’d been the one forced to yield, the one to be dragged, kicking and screaming, away from whatever it was she’d fought to hold onto. That was what had made her so tenacious, what had helped her survive. Maybe it had been monumentally stupid and self-defeating, standing in the way of what had once been his idea of progress. Turning down that money.

Money they’d never intended to give her in the first place, but… she hadn’t known that.

“And you’re willing to share those documents?” the reporter asked, her voice hopeful in the speakers on Ben’s laptop. “I’ve been searching for something, anything, to connect the dots—to connect Snoke to this…”

“You can have everything,” Ben said.

His voice was curt, but calm and matter-of-fact. And yet Rey could hear the undercurrent of emotion beneath it. She burrowed in closer, and pressed a kiss to the back of his hand. In response, Ben caressed her cheek.

It felt good.

She didn’t have to fight anymore. She didn’t have to scratch out a life from the unfeeling earth. It was going to take time for them to find their footing, but they could do it together. Rey knew that, as sure as she knew the world would keep spinning. She could feel it in every gentle touch—hear it, in every word.

With her eyes shut, and her body warm and content, it was no wonder that sleep eventually overcame her. Rey woke to the feeling of the bed being moved, the sound of Ben’s whispered apology as he moved to hold her in his arms.

“You don’t have to apologize,” Rey murmured, drowsily.

“I do,” Ben said, his voice low and gentle. “For so many things.”

“Not for this, though,” Rey said. Her eyes were still closed; she felt him pull her back against the warm solidity of his frame, made a soft and eager noise as his hips rolled once, on instinct, against her ass. “And not for _that_ , either.”

He laughed softly.

“We could—?” Rey began, rolling her hips in response to this, a tentative but wonderful spark flaring to life at the juncture of her thighs.

“We will,” came his response—a promise, sealed with a gentle kiss over her pulse.

Despite herself, Rey yawned. She could fight it, assert herself, roll over and claim his mouth with a kiss—but contentment had replaced urgency. What a strange new world it was, to learn not to grab at things in fear that they’d immediately be taken away…

“Okay,” she said, simply. “Okay.”

And she slept, content in the arms of the man who had come back for her. The one who would always be there for her.

The one who loved her.


	14. Chapter 14

It was morning, and Rey was in Ben Solo’s apartment.

Outside, the rain was falling.

She’d woken up to the sound of it, rolled over in bed and looked at the clock on the bedside table, stretching like a contented cat in the warmth of the sheets. It was a lazy sort of a sound, soft and steady, so unlike the relentless percussion of the storm on the roof and sides of the van. Twice, now—twice that she could recall, anyway—Rey had surfaced out of the depths of restful sleep, and let the sound and the softness of the sheets lure her back into slumber.

There hadn’t been any reason, any need to stir.

Both of those times, Ben had been there. Holding her close to his body, something she’d never dared hope for, never knew she wanted or craved or needed. He’d been asleep, then, too. Vulnerable and young-looking, with no bad dreams to trouble either of them in this, the second night she’d spent in his bed. Rey felt her body grow lax and pliant and curiously fond, thinking of the way his face had softened in sleep.

What a pleasure, just to be able to watch him.

What further pleasures she hoped were yet to come. Because she wasn’t going anywhere. For the first time in her life, she didn’t want to cut and run. It was a strange and curiously soft feeling. Rey didn’t know what to make of it, and knew she didn’t have the energy to question it, either. Not now. Maybe later.

Ben wasn’t beside her in the bed when she finally awoke for good, but a folded piece of paper had been placed on the bedside table. Rey rubbed at her eyes and felt a warm glow in her chest spread when she saw that it bore his scrawl across it: Coffee, _back soon._

Rey smiled as she read it.

His handwriting was messy, but so him. She couldn’t explain it. Rey reached out and brushed her fingers across the words, then withdrew her arm, burrowing beneath the warmth of the bed once more.

It was simple—this moment was simple. The rain, and the bed, and the quiet. The light coming in through the space where the drapes had been parted.

The comfort, the trust that he would return.

It felt like the first stroke of paint on canvas: Pure in color, bold and assertive. A declaration of a moment, with more color, more life, yet to come.

It was nearly eleven. Rey closed her eyes, half-chasing the last tendrils of sleep, before deciding to stay awake. Any more dozing, and she’d lose the day completely. She felt whole again, markedly recovered from her cold, grateful that it hadn’t turned the corner and settled into something worse in her lungs. There were so many things left to do, but that, at least, had passed.

Peace.

What was that like?

And what would it feel like, not just in this moment, but for the next one, and the next, and the next?

Security and contentment were just words. The fear of scarcity had been planted in her heart, and from it, a deeper terror had woven itself around every aspect of her consciousness like a choking vine. She didn’t dare hope for more than this moment—hadn’t allowed herself to hope. It had always been too frightening, stepping off into the unknown. So she’d stayed. Burrowed herself in deep and secure. Forgotten what hope could even feel like.

Forever had been a threat. Alone forever, desperate and hungry forever.

Now, it meant something entirely different. Rey hadn’t yet begun to unpuzzle what it could mean, but she was oh so eager to find out.

At that moment, the door to his apartment opened.

Rey smiled, and opened her eyes.

He’d said he would come back, and here he was. From behind the closed bedroom door, she heard the faint sound of a thunk, and a muffled curse, as if he’d bumped an elbow or shin on something as he’d entered the kitchen. She heard a cupboard door open, a plate set down on a counter.

Her stomach growled in response.

Rey threw back the covers, and put her feet on the ground. She was wearing one of his clean white undershirts, which hung down past her thighs. He’d offered it to her, after the shower yesterday, before the interview… It felt like a week ago, or a month. So much had happened—and more than that, so much of her had changed, when she’d been lost and found again in the storm.

Ben was still doing whatever it was he was doing in the kitchen, but Rey stood up, and looked back over her shoulder, at the window, at the sliver of light shining through.

She was ready. Something inside had changed, and she wanted—needed to look.

Rey walked to the window.

She opened the drapes a little, enough to look down at the unmistakable, gaping hole where her home used to lay.

It was dirt, now.

Fenced-off, with tracks from the construction vehicles striped in ruts across the rectangular block. They were filling with water as the rain came down, and Rey took a sharp breath, waiting for the pang of regret, the sting of anger, the ache of longing to hit her.

Instead, she felt curiously... free.

Everything she’d wanted and fought for was gone.

She ought to be angry about that—and she was, but there was a different shade to her feeling. It meant something different. She couldn’t explain why, or when her feelings had changed. There was a simple lightness that filled her, looking down into the mud and the memories.

It was gone.

But she was still here.

Standing there with her hands on the thick, velvet curtains, staring down at the dark, wet earth, Rey heard Ben come into the room. He didn’t say anything, just set something down on the dresser—the plate from before, if she had to guess—and came closer, until he was standing behind her. He wrapped his arms around her, settling the side of his face against her temple, breathing her in.

He knew she was looking at it. But he could only guess at what she was feeling. Rey hardly knew herself.

“You okay?”

Rey nodded. His voice was a comforting, low rumble into the very cells of her form. It felt as if she could ask him anything, and be granted the absolute truth; that promise was exhilarating.

When you need something, ask me...

Right now, she needed the truth.

“Did you think I was stupid,” she asked, leaning back into his solid warmth, “when I wouldn’t take your money?”

Ben stiffened a little at this. He took another deep breath of her scent. His chest was steady and warm against her back, and she could almost hear him thinking.

“Did you think I was blind?”

“I was blind, too,” was his reply. That wasn’t exactly an answer to her question, but…

Rey smiled softly, and pressed her skin into his. She let the cloth slide against her fingers, releasing it so she could curl her hands up, tucking them under her chin as she held onto his solid arms.

“Was I acting like a child? Was I wrong?”

She’d asked herself these questions, and so many more, from the first moment she’d met him. Before then, really—when the first offer had come. She’d known what it had meant to refuse them. What the money could’ve brought her. And although Rey hadn’t known that the offer would fall through, due to the machinations and manipulations of First Order, it had still been a dumb move, on paper, and anywhere else.

But… she was allowed to fail, and to learn.

Her stubbornness had been her curse, and her salvation.

She was a mixed-up mess of a person—and so was he. And despite her not being able to articulate any of it, Rey had the sense that, out of anyone else in the world, Ben understood what that duality meant.

He sighed, warm breath ruffling against her hair; the shift of his cheek against hers, followed by the press of his lips on her cheekbone made her shiver.

“I wish I could’ve known you as a kid,” he said. There was a tint of longing to his voice.

This was not at all where she’d thought he’d go with her line of questioning; Rey turned, standing in the circle of his arms, and looked up at him.

“Why?”

“I can just imagine you—” he began, but then cut himself off, dark eyes searching her face.

“What?”

Rey’s voice was as soft as the muted rain outside. Soft as the sweep of his dark lashes, the dusting of dark stubble on his skin. And he did that thing—working his mouth, chewing on his words, the way he had, that first time he’d walked into her life. Wanting to be understood, wholly and completely, but always lacking the right way to explain what was inside.

She felt that way, too.

He shook his head, and the smile on his lips was bittersweet and almost tender.

“I try to imagine who could’ve had you, and not loved you.”

Tears immediately began to well in her eyes; Rey wanted to look away.

“Don’t—”

“I know,” he said, drawing her close, letting her rest her cheek on his chest. “I know.”

He held her like that for a long time. Rey didn’t have to pretend that her tears didn’t leave the front of his shirt wet, or that she sniffled. Or that he wasn’t crying, too.

Messy, she thought. Messy, and loved, and healing.

He who had seen the very worst of her.

She who knew his darkest demons.

They had so far to go, yet—so many conversations that were necessary. But for the first time, Rey wasn’t scared of having them, wasn’t terrified of what vulnerability might feel like. He was far from perfect, and she had made mistakes, and both of them had deep, lasting wounds that would take time and care to heal. Like a building, it wouldn’t spring up overnight; they would build the foundations, dig out the earth and set down forms for something that could rise, in time—new, and solid, and real.

The prospect of going on that journey was more tender, more hopeful, than Rey could ever have imagined.

“I want to show you something,” he said, when his arms softened around her, when they somehow mutually decided the moment had crested and begun to subdue. How he fucking just knew her, saw right through her—

Rey wiped at her eyes, tilting up to look at him. Ben was smiling.

“C’mere.”

He offered her his hand, and led her out of the room—past the plate of newly-obtained pastries he’d set on the dresser, which Rey was definitely going to investigate later—and around the corner, to where an office space had been set up in the alcove of his apartment’s living room. There, on the desk, were an unrolled set of architectural drawings.

She looked back at him; Ben nodded, and gestured at the half-rolled paper. Rey stepped forward to unroll them, placing down a nearby etched glass paperweight and a stapler in the curling corners, revealing a beautiful, detailed rendering of a building. It was modern, with wide, abundant windows, but it was framed in warm woods and set on a frame of grass and trees.

“It’s two buildings,” Ben began, shoving his hands in the pockets of his jeans with an uncharacteristic nervousness. “First floor commercial and small-business space, and upper floors for town homes and studios. There’s a central courtyard and community garden, and depending on which developer picks it up, we can—”

“Did you draw this?”

Rey looked down at the corner of the illustration and saw that now-familiar name, in his easily-identifiable handwriting. She turned, and gaped up at Ben.

“You drew this.”

He nodded.

“It’s—”

“There’s no formal plans yet,” he said, nerves evident in his voice: “I’m still—”

“When did you learn to do this?”

“I was two years into my architecture degree, when Snoke…” Ben cleared his throat. “Anyway, I’ve just been… I wanted to put something there that you would be proud of, if you ever came back. All the things you said, about the neighborhood, and the community. How people didn’t see what it was worth, how the new developments drove people away. You were right. And... I wanted people to see you in it, even if they didn’t know...”

Rey looked back down at the artwork. She hadn’t seen it, not in the overall image of the space; it had looked like just a beautiful, green and living thing. But then she looked closer, and there she was.

In the shape of the turned spindles, in the balcony railings. The milk-glass light fixtures, shining and radiant against the dark wood grain.

In the little vague shapes, drawn to suggest a pair doing yoga in the courtyard.

In the signs above each of the stores on the first floor: A record shop; a sign with gears and wires; a bookstore.

The contents of her loft, her life, all the precious things she’d gathered to her heart and had to abandon. He had brought them back. And down on the ground floor: A shop with a green, familiar leaf, and the name: Skywalkers. Even though Luke might not ever see this—

“You made this... for me?”

“Yes.”

“Even if I never saw it,” Rey said. “Even if you couldn’t—”

“There’s nothing more than plans, yet,” Ben hastened to say. “I’m out of First Order, and I don’t have any idea how—”

Rey turned around and launched herself into his arms, kissing him to silence him. Whatever shock and surprise Ben had at this melted away instantaneously as he gathered her up. She loved how easily he could just pick her up, how sturdy he was, as she clung to him with her hands on his broad shoulders, her bare legs wrapped around his waist.

“I—” he tried to say, between kisses, breaking off with a incredulous, grateful laugh as he carried her over to the couch. “Your things, Rey—there’s two storage units, I’ve been paying them for you, you can get everything back, if you—”

“I’ll personally light the match for all of it if it means you’ll kiss me again,” Rey said, and she meant it.

Ben tried to deposit her onto his couch, but Rey held on. An absurd giggle bubbled out of her throat, and Ben laughed, too, holding her and adjusting his grip under her thighs.

Whatever else either of them were going to say melted away as he kissed her. From there, it was easy, so easy, to let herself get swept away. But it was different this time, so different from what it had been like. She didn’t have to hide or pretend. Didn’t have to wrench every last scrap of pleasure from the moment. It could just happen.

She could just… be.

And she could tell—through some strange and unknowable connection—that he felt the same.

Insane, perhaps. Idealistic and just as naive as she’d been before now—possibly.

But Rey didn’t care.

Because she wasn’t afraid. And she was happy. And that was everything.

Ben could’ve backed her up against the windows and made love to her right there, but instead, he slowed down their kissing, lowering her feet to the ground, pointedly not getting carried away with what both of them were feeling. When he stood up, and Rey met his gaze, as usual having to look up to do so. His height and size did things to her, and she felt an answering throb of focused need that she knew he felt as well.

“I want to see you,” Ben said, his voice a gentle murmur. His hand went down to the hem of the shirt she was wearing, and Rey nodded to show him that it was okay.

Slowly, he pulled the t-shirt off of her, revealing her—all of her—to his heated gaze. Rey stood in the middle of his living room, lit only by the diffuse, gray light, the reflection scattering shards of light from the rain onto her skin. Normally, she might’ve shied away, tried to cover herself.

Instead, Rey stood tall and proud, like a goddess. She felt like one, the way his eyes worshipped her.

“There’s just one more thing,” Ben said. His voice was low and soft and sent a shiver of awareness down to her core.

But then, her brow furrowed in confusion as he turned away from her, retreating back to the desk. As he turned, Rey spotted—how could she miss it—the tenting of his jeans. If he was eager for more, and she was, then why was he waiting? What could possibly be more important than the fire that was brimming between them? She bit back her curiosity, nipples peaking in the cold as Ben opened the top drawer of his desk.

He turned around, and in his hands was a small, familiar, brown kraft box.

“You kept it,” she said.

He nodded.

“I thought you might’ve… bought it as a gift,” Rey swallowed thickly as he stepped closer. “For someone.”

Ben shook his head, and took the cover off of the box, tucking it on the bottom. The twine had been unknotted; that was long gone. But the necklace, her favorite emerald necklace, lay against the tuft of white cotton. She held her breath when he lifted it out, setting the box aside with a flick of his wrist and a quiet clatter to the floor. Then he circled her, and Rey closed her eyes, holding a breath as the cold metal was placed at her throat.

Two hundred dollars.

That was what she’d charged him for this piece.

Money she’d taken to buy groceries. Groceries she’d spilled, and he’d repurchased.

She lifted a shaking hand to trace across the scrollwork and stones. Thinking about it—about all of it. Lentils, and bread, and peanut butter. Lighting, and blood, and raw confessions.

Yoga, and desire, and what had come after.

“I wanted to see you in this,” Ben said, his voice little more than a warm breath on the nape of her neck as he leaned close to nuzzle at her hair line again. “Just this.”

Rey was lost for words. Slowly, she felt one of his fingertips trace down from the clasp, across the faint bumps of her spine. Down, and down, and down.

He chased his breath with a soft, plush kiss, and Rey curled her toes in response.

She was halfway to coming right here, standing naked, wearing nothing but emeralds, and raindrops, and kisses.

After that, he carried her to bed.

His bed—and hers, now, too.

Their love was easy. It was like breathing, feeling him gather her into his sturdy arms, feeling him lower his mouth to taste her and bring her to a fierce and rolling climax. Rey surrendered to him, fell and let him catch her. And her reward for her trust was the sound that rumbled up from his chest, a low groan that was practically a purr of pleasure as she writhed and begged and came, hard, from his determined touch and sinful mouth.

She smiled as he crawled atop her. Laughed, when he sheathed himself inside of her—what was this happiness, what in the world had she done to deserve it? She didn’t know.

It didn’t matter.

It wasn’t about worth, or what she or he deserved. Life had given them what it had given them, no more and no less. And now it had given them each other.

Rey clawed her blunt nails down his back, and urged him inside. As before, he was almost too much for her to take. But he moved slowly, so gently and so carefully, until her little gasps of pleasure gave way to muttered demands that he move, goddamnit.

And then he was smiling too.

From there, analysis was pointless. Rey felt as if she had been distilled down to sensation—the feel of his body against hers, the feel of his cock filling her and retreating, the feel of pressure and pleasure building, steady and slow and unhurried. The gentle swipe of his hand across the side of her temple; she was crying, and smiling, and he was here, and he was holding her, and she could let go.

Rey cried out as she came, the feeling rolling through her like a wave, like her body was a conduit for something greater. Ben followed her, close behind, crying out with a noise that she held and cherished and filed away as she clung to him, and he to her.

Home, she thought. She was home.

And as if she had vocalized that very thought—perhaps she had, unknowingly, dazed and sated as she was in the afterglow—Ben kissed her, and told her that she was his home, too.

* * *

After, when their touches grow lazy and languid, Ben’s cock stirred yet again against her thigh, and Rey laughed.

“You’re insatiable.”

Ben just growled softly against her skin, playful and eager and relaxed. Rey kissed him—on the mouth, several times, and then on his nose, and then, dodging his hands on her skin, she giggled and rolled away from him, the urgent needs of her bladder pressing, delaying but certainly not stopping what promised to be a delightful attempt at round two.

He let her go, and Rey glanced back to look at him, smiling. Ben was laying there in the bed, bare and revealed to her. He looked slightly concussed, but in a romantic sort of way. There wasn’t even a hint of the post-sex arrangement of blankets like in the movies, she thought; they’d kicked them all to the floor, but he didn’t seem to care at all. Instead, he looked soft and relaxed and—well, not soft, not in certain areas.

Rey rolled her eyes at this, and shimmied her hips playfully as she went into the bathroom.

After doing what was necessary, she washed her hands in his sink and glanced up at her reflection in the mirror, feeling like if any human on the planet had a right to be glowing right now, it was her. Then her eyes fell to the necklace around her throat.

Her finger traced over the green stones, and she smiled a little. Perfection in imperfection, she thought, tracing over the single empty socket. One of the green stones had fallen out at some point between the box and the bed, but Rey smiled regardless. There was time to rebuild. Time to repair it—to make it better, and to make it theirs.

There were still so many things to resolve, between them and around them. So many conversations yet to be had. So much work they knew they had to do. Ben was on his way, and Rey resolved that she, too, would stop running, and start facing her fears. Because if a little bit of that led to such contentment, then she would do whatever it took to keep it that way. For so long she’d focused on repairing everything her hands touched, not thinking that she herself deserved the same level of care.

The thought humbled her.

But she was ready.

And it wasn’t just because of the sex.

(The sex had been… amazing. But that wasn’t the only reason.)

“Hey,” Ben’s voice called out to her from the bedroom, and Rey snapped out of her hazy reverie. “You coming back, sweetheart?”

“Yes,” Rey said. Her voice was strong, and clear, and sure. “Yes, I am.”


	15. Chapter 15

_Epilogue: One year later._

* * *

“All right,” Rey said, from the doorway. “Time to start wrapping up your projects for today. We’ll have another open makerspace event next Thursday, from two o’clock to eight, same as usual.”

The assembly of ten or so people currently stationed at the wide room’s various work tables and tools slowly began to pack up, as instructed; Rey went over to them, spending a few minutes talking with each of them, encouraging, giving advice.

She was a natural at this—a capable and gentle teacher, even though Ben knew that she’d wave away the title, say she’s only answering questions. But in the two months since the space has been open, Rey’s learned or improved her knowledge of the CNC machine, 3D printer, various shop tools and equipment, and helped host a handful of Kids Can Craft workshops this very month to teach twelve-year-olds how to work with circuits, so Ben’s willing to say that he can push back on her modesty.

She’s a teacher. And a damn good one, at that.

Ben lingered along the back wall, at one of the work tables, ostensibly tidying up his tools while the rest of the people closed laptops, put away soldering irons, or chatted with each other as they left. In the corner, the larger of the two 3D printers was steadily laying down layer after layer of components of a complex cosplay project, currently in process by one of the frequent makerspace visitors. Rey was, technically, the facilitator of the space, but Ben always stayed behind on Thursdays to help her clean.

Tonight, though…

He tucked his work into the pocket of his jeans, and turned back to look at her.

In her worn, canvas work apron and messy bun, she looked radiant, energized. Happy. She’d look amazing in an evening gown—even humored him and wore one, when the new pair of buildings had been dedicated, standing beside his mother in the community space as both of them had beamed up at him with pride—or in sweats and one of his worn t-shirts, but she looks good like this. Consistent meals have helped fill out a little bit of the ropy leanness to her frame, and although he certainly wasn’t complaining about her body before, it’s nice and gratifying on some primal level to see her look healthy. Well-fed. Well-rested—no more dark circles under her eyes. Just crinkles, when she smiles.

She smiles a lot, these days.

He does too.  

 _The Balance,_ so named for the two L-shaped buildings that now occupied the block, had been a labor of love in the truest sense of the word. Even though his career in property development had been put on hold, through reconnection with his mother and encouragement from Rey, Ben had gone back to finish his architecture degree, and was on track to finish it in less than a year. His mother’s contacts had collaborated to bring his dream to fruition, creating the space for shops and housing, working with local laws to make the zoning more inclusive, the prices more affordable.

He couldn’t bring back what it had been, but he would be damn sure to use everything in his power to make it change from here on out. That was his new mission, his joy. All of the time he'd spent, trying to kill the past, trying to bury it and look away, and what had healed him was letting it be his teacher. Learning how to feel again, to love, to forgive. To forgive others. To forgive himself. 

It wasn't easy. The road hadn't been straight, but she had been there to walk beside him all the way. And he had been there for her. And he was so, so fucking grateful.

Ben cooked for her, every night. He set it as a task to heal himself, and kept attending therapy weekly. It wasn’t always easy, and there were still arguments yet to come that neither of them could foresee yet.

Sometimes, one of them still woke up, dreams and memories weighing too heavily on their hearts. But when they did, they weren’t alone in the darkness to face it by themselves.

Ben hadn’t had a drink in over a year.

And he felt… good. Healthy.

He felt okay.

“I was thinking,” Rey said, as the last of the makerspace people had filed out, “about offering community repair events. You know, people can bring in their old TVs or DVD players, or radios, and we can work on them together. Teach them how to fix it.”

Ben smiled. “That sounds like a good idea.”

Rey returned his smile, and rubbed at the back of her neck, an unconscious gesture, as she looked around the space to see what wasn’t yet secured or tidied up quite right. She was particular about the space, and about preserving the tools so that as many people as possible could use them.

While she was distracted, Ben reached into his pocket.

Nerves jangling, he took a deep breath, and cupped his hand around the small object.

“Rey, can you… take a look at something for me?”

“Sure,” she said, narrowing her eyes at a pile of filament spools that hadn’t been put back on the proper shelf. “What is—?”

Rey looked down, and her eyes went wide. Sitting atop the small, healed scar in the palm of his left hand was a ring.

* * *

Glinting green, in the palm of his hand, the lost cushion-cut emerald had been set into a simple silver band. Everything around her seemed to slow down, distilling into him and her, and the circle of metal, and the green of the stone—and the warmth in his eyes, when she met his gaze.

“Not much of a jeweler,” he said, standing tall and steady before her as he spoke, “but… I found the stone, where it had fallen out of the setting, and I… kept it.”

Tears welled up and began to glisten in his eyes, but he was smiling. Love—she felt full to bursting at the sight of him, slowly lowering himself down to one knee, right there on the dusty, unswept concrete floor.

“You showed me that new things could still grow out of the old. New memories, new hope. Over the past year, I’ve just been waiting for the right moment to ask what I knew from the start. Will you please marry me?”

The noise that came out of her mouth was somewhere between a squeak and a sob. How lucky was she, to feel so adored, so cherished—to have the chance to be loved so deeply and so completely, more than she’d ever dreamed.

Eventually, though, she realized she was still just standing there, stock-still, her hands having risen to cover her mouth.

Rey nodded, then, and his expression softened as reassurance and relief washed over his face. Mesmerized, she lowered her left hand to where the ring lay waiting, letting him slip it on.

* * *

“Yes,” she whispered. And then, stronger, more sure: “Yes, yes, Ben, _yes_ , I want to marry you.”

He rose, then, hands still holding hers, tugging her forward and into his embrace.


End file.
